#than a single nonwhite kid

[valena-nedela]

Someone shared this AI generated yearbook in a Discord and ever since it's lived in my head and I started coming up with lore for the weird AI children.

Aiden in the dark green is the true Aiden. Aiden in the light green is his flawed clone, which came out too symmetrical. Although everyone who meets False Aiden experiences feelings of revulsion at his subtle inhumanity, all agree he's still a more pleasant child than True Aiden.

There were at one point many more Bortses in the class, but Grey Shirt Borts has been gradually consuming all the others. Red Shirt Borts is the last one standing but he knows his time will come.

Hunby knows.

Jort is Red Shirt Borts's brother. He looks like he's on the verge of tears because he noticed Grey Shirt Borts did not pack a lunch today, and he knows that means this is the day he goes home alone.

Chunus and Jorch are both actually too young to grow their own beards. The striking similarity in their facial hair is because both are hosts to the same species of hirsute symbiotes.

As Hobem grows, his neck is gradually being replaced by even more chin. No one knows what he is becoming, but he seems happy about it so they try not to worry.

Furus has seen where this all leads. Her smile is false. More false than any of the other students. She knows what they should all fear, but also knows there is no hope of escape. There is no light in her eyes anymore.

Hogby is not her real name. She adopted it to blend in. She doesn't know how she got here, or what the others will do if they realize she doesn't belong.

[traegorn]

its honestly really, really scary seeing people refuse to vote because where i live, when trump was elected it had very palpable and real consequences. i remember i was in middle school and hearing kids cry because they were terrified their parents were going to be deported. i remember how much worse the homophobia and racism in my school got. i remember the fear my (nonwhite) mother had for her children increasing beyond belief. and thats a light example, theres alot of people who experienced much worse than i did!! and its so frustrating seeing people who live in blue states where their rights arent questioned every single day choose to sit this one out and leave the rest of us for dead. im legitimately so scared lmfao, i just wanted to finish my bachelors degree

If it's any consolation, the folks you see saying that are a small percentage of the folks out there. If you're just watching my blog, you'll miss that most of the folks in the notes on those posts are on our side.

There is hope and we can get through this -- and there will be a day when we are thriving and not just fighting to survive.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Ian Rowe

Published: Sep 14, 2023

Imagine you are twelve years old and your public-school teacher asks you and your seventh-grade classmates to stand side by side in a line. The instructor lists a series of personal attributes and says that you must take an action based on your alignment with a particular attribute, to demonstrate either your privilege or your disenfranchisement:

“If you are white, take two steps forward. If you’re a person of color with dark skin, take two steps back. If you’re black, take two steps back.”

This exercise, part of what is called a Colorism Privilege Walk, actually occurred at public schools in Evanston, Ill., and at many other schools across the country. According to the lesson plan, the goal was for white students to “learn more about white privilege, internalized dominance, microaggressions and how to act as an ally for students of color.” In other words, the point was to reveal the real sources of a person’s privilege: the unearned benefit of being white over the intrinsic victimhood of being nonwhite.

Because of these student Privilege Walks, and since the district had also conducted professional-development sessions that divided teachers by race, an Evanston teacher and the Southeastern Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit accusing Evanston School District 65 of violating the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause and Title VI’s prohibition on discrimination at federally funded educational institutions.

In all likelihood, these racially divisive practices in Evanston will be found legally impermissible — especially given the Supreme Court’s decision deeming race-based affirmative action unconstitutional in college admissions. Yet across a country now transfixed by the pursuit of equity, there is an obsession with determining what factors drive economic inequality and whether a person is inherently privileged or inherently oppressed based on a single characteristic, most notably race.

Against this backdrop, enter economist Melissa Kearney, who has done America a great service by publishing The Two-Parent Privilege. Kearney unequivocally states: “Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children. There is simply not currently a robust, widespread alternative to marriage in US society.” In terms of benefits to children, not all family configurations are the same. Throughout the book, Kearney posits the necessary caveat that no person should remain in an unhealthy or violent marriage, but she makes plain the case that a married, two-parent household is generally superior to alternative arrangements such as cohabitation and single parenthood.

Rather than resort to making a moral or religious argument for marriage, Kearney, an MIT-trained economist, is determined to “bring the social science evidence on family structure from the obscurity of academic journals into the public conversation.”

Kearney simply sticks to the facts and makes an overwhelming data-based case that marriage and stable two-parent families matter monumentally to the life prospects of children — far more than the usually invoked suspects of race and gender. According to Kearney, in 2019, “77% of white children and 88% of Asian children lived with married parents. The share among Hispanic children was 62%. Only 38% of black children live with married parents — a historically low share that reflects a downward trend over four decades.” With such huge differences in family structure by race, how can one not fairly conclude that family-structure disparity is the greatest driving force behind racial disparities in education, crime, and virtually every area of concern for kids growing into young adulthood?

Indeed, Kearney surgically lays out the new dividing line in America’s quest for upward mobility:

There has been a massive widening of the family gap, such that a two-parent family has become yet another advantage in life enjoyed disproportionately by the college-educated class. The decline in the two-parent family among parents without a four-year college degree is a demographic trend that should concern anyone who cares about the well-being of children and about widespread economic opportunity, inequality, and social mobility in America.

One can only hope that during this election season presidential contenders emphasize how crucial healthy marriages and two-parent households are as the foundation for achieving virtually every social or economic policy objective. They would be wise to follow several of the policy recommendations in Kearney’s book, including, most notably, improving the economic position of non-college-educated men so that they are more reliable marriage partners and fathers. But Kearney recognizes that policy alone will not solve the problem. She strongly argues for a cultural shift that fosters a norm of two-parent homes, in part by simply being open and “honest about the benefits that a two-parent family home confers” on children.

In reviewing Kearney’s prescription, my only wish is that she had spent more time in two areas: (1) advocating that marriage and family structure become a standard data category through which child outcomes are analyzed, especially in education; and (2) identifying strategies to engage the rising generation to think differently about their decisions when it comes to the timing of their own family formation.

In regard to the former, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (a.k.a. the Nation’s Report Card) reports reams of educational data disaggregated by race, gender, geography, and other usual-suspect categories. But family structure is not one of them, despite the paramount role that marriage plays in influencing achievement gaps.

Including family structure could create opportunities to implement different types of interventions that could improve life outcomes for the next generation. For example, at Vertex Partnership Academies, the virtues-based high school I launched in the Bronx in 2022, in a class called Pathways to Power we teach the data associated with the “success sequence.” This is research that shows that the vast majority of young adults who graduate from high school, get full-time jobs, and marry before having children reach the middle class by their early 30s. Young people deserve to know this information, especially when they live in environments where most neighboring families have not followed that sequence.

* * *

In May 2001, writing for National Journal, Jonathan Rauch noted that, “according to Census Bureau data, a two-parent black household is more likely to be poor than is a two-parent white household, but both are far less likely to be poor than is a mother-only household of either race. In other words, if you are a baby about to be born, your best odds are to choose married black parents over unmarried white ones.”

Rauch was highlighting then what Kearney so effectively illustrates now, that in economic terms a parent’s marital status has displaced race and class as a primary driver of child poverty and upward mobility.

And perhaps this message is finally getting through. For evidence, look no further than a four-minute video titled “If someone doesn’t understand privilege, show them this.” Across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and several media platforms, it has been viewed more than a staggering 125 million times. It captures another Privilege Walk, but in this case the personal attributes being presented are markedly different from those posed in Evanston.

The first two directives are: “Take two steps forward if both of your parents are still married. Take two steps forward if you grew up with a father figure in the home.”

In Kearney’s final chapter, she warns that “if millions of American children miss out on the benefits that come from a two-parent home and if the family gap continues to widen” then “children will suffer, inequality will continue to widen, and social mobility will erode.” It does not have to be this way. If we are brutally honest in accepting Kearney’s analysis of what truly privileges children, we know what the next steps forward should be.

[ Via: https://archive.md/F4YE8 ]

--

[ Source: Wikipedia ]

[ Source: Mother Jones ]

==

Stop blaming things on "systemic" -isms. There are often known or contributing factors at play, and refusing to acknowledge or address them is dishonest, not virtuous. It identifies nothing, solves nothing, and only serves to make people feel powerless, who are not actually powerless. Although, perhaps that's the point.

Where two-parent households are not possible, it should always default to joint/shared custody, rather than sole custody, with sole only as a last resort when unavoidable.

Joint custody should be the rule, not the exception

Children Likely to Be Better Adjusted in Joint vs Sole Custody Arrangements in Most Cases, According to Review of Research

The Consequences of Fatherlessness

[obsidianstrawberrymilk]

The reason I hate S2 and 3 is because while S1 did mainly flesh out Klaus, Viktor and Luther it also gave us clues into everyone’s else’s trauma that were never touched on and now three seasons in Five and Diego have yet to be properly fleshed out, Allison went from a great arc (S2) but no trauma explored to what the fuck (S3) (side note she SHOULD have had a villain arc but they just had her turn a 180 w no explanation instead of having a slow descent into villainy that would’ve been way more compelling imo), and Umbrella Ben is apparently dead now. Sparrow Ben ily but I wanted to see more of Umbrella Ben and them hating each other.

Everyone is either turned into a joke (Diego and Klaus, and Luther), overpowered as fuck (Viktor), given really shitty/nonexistent arcs (Ben, Allison, Five), or literally isn’t there enough to have a character despite how interesting it would be (every single one of the Sparrows). The plot twist Stan isn’t Lila and Diego’s kid is stupid bc they’re both clearly nonwhite and he clearly is white. Then again ig the writers keep forgetting Diego’s POC given how they never touch on that once even in the 60s (side from the bar scene w Allison ig).

Also, expansion of Diego’s powers??? Bro can control trajectory and you just. Do nothing more than him controlling bullets?? EVERYTHING HAS TRAJECTORY. He can control falling water or falling people or the fucking. TRAJECTORY OF PLANETS AND SHIT IN SPACE IF HE WANTED. Like?? Five. HE DID SO MUCH COOL SHIT IN S2 THAT’S NEVER EXPANDED ON? Viktor bby ily but why are you just going boom blast thing now. His powers are sound focus on that!! Really good hearing, soundwaves, controlling what people hear?? Holy FUCK stop giving him powers and start expanding on them.

Also Luther stop marrying your sisters please.

[clonehub]

Hi, I was wondering if you could tell me (or point me towards someone who could, the onus doesn't have to be on you) about the racism problem on AO3? I've seen people mention it but I've never gotten a clear explanation-- is it a user problem, or something foundational? Sorry for the bother.

No problem!

The racism is definitely a user issue.

Lots of fandoms have massive racism issues often because the fans are Majority white. Like I think AO3's user base is about 80%+ white? People keep writing any range of racist fanfiction. Sidelining the only Black character in your fic is one thing, but then there's people who take it to extremes of writing outright antiBlack propaganda, fetishizing slavery/nonwhite races, etc. And then you get troll fics like the one I mentioned in that post. Fandoms are incredibly toxic, racist spaces and AO3 is no exception

But then the issue is also that there's no way to report a fic like that. Its blatantly racist. It's disgusting. I think they also only recently added a block button? So you for a while you couldn't block people who wrote stuff like that. I should know because when a bunch of reylos started writing porn in the comments of a fic I wrote where Kylo Ren dies I couldnt do a thing about it.

Either way, community moderation is hardly even a thing, and it's because so many (remember, mostly white) AO3 users are convinced that the second you can like. Flag a trollfic for advocating slavery or something all of the AO3 community they're supposedly besties with will pile onto their normie fics and get them taken down--which actually says a lot about how they view their own community lol. I also personally find it amazing that these mostly white AO3 users will fully believe that they're most likely going to the the victims of dogpiling hate and not the PoC in the fandom.

So they'd rather let racism proliferate in their spaces than even attempt to do anything about them--once again, because despite many of these (white) people's claims of fighting in the interests of racial minorities (I saw a post like that lol) many of these people draw the line at self moderation or any community moderation of any kind. I had someone on that Floyd post say that it was actually a good sign that nobody read the trollfic, as if that was the point of what I was making at all.

And let's not forget the age-old mantra of "don't like, don't read". People apply this to literally everything lol. It's an easy and dismissive way to shut down the complaints of people of color when we try to talk about racist fanfictions and we try to call out/educate the general fan space on how to avoid these things. Often AO3 authors abhor the idea of critiques of ANY kind (despite fics supposedly being an art form lol) so that's another way that fans of color are prevented from defending themselves in fandom spaces.

AO3 is incredibly toxic. I had to leave. There were too many white people in the star wars: the clone wars fandom writing fanfictions sexualizing and fetishizing being a slave. Too many slavery au fics about Finn from the sequel trilogy. Too many fics hypersexualizing every single female character, including the ones that were literally kids. Too many grown ass white people justifying all of this.

I've never heard of an ~archive~ that doesn't moderate their content at all in any way. I've never heard of a website that demands to be taken seriously while not even giving users the basic tools needed to protect themselves. Even the dark mode isn't/wasn't easy to get to lmao. AO3 is overrun with racists, just like any other white-dominated online space. Many of them will try to convince you that any action taken about racism has two key facts about it, a) that those of us who want people to stop being racist (their racist fics are an expression of that racism) are actually just pro-censorship, and b) that we're actually bringing up racism because we want to cover the fact that we're ~really~ mad about kinks and ships.

This is long lol. But tldr ao3 is a white-dominated incredibly racist and toxic space that doesn't give its users the basic tools needed to curate their own online experience. white ao3 users insist on an equally racist, reductive, and paternalistic argument against those of us saying racist fics (racism in general) has no right to exist in fandom spaces by accusing us of wanting wanton censorship, leaning all the way into the slippery slope fallacy, and insiting that they're actually doing it because they care about how modertion might affect PoC--and we're saying all this because of our sinister secret motive of kink hating/ship hating/anti beheavior. Remember that white women make up a majority of that website, and as people who experience exactly one axis of oppression, they realign every conversation to be about gender and sexuality.

Okay so the tldr got into some new stuff akjsdhlaksjdf but basically that's it! if it wasn't clear, I do not like that website lmao.

clowns on this post will get dragged i make no exceptions.

[goingtolebanon]

Why do you emphasize needing to think Very Hard about the specific ethnicity and culture and how hard “losing the culture” is for “poc” when… shouldn’t you be doing that for all characters. Like what ethnicity are the “white” characters (why do you list martin as mixed filipino (specific) and white (very unspecific… polish? english? what?)). You’d need to research a Russian character, tho they’re “white.” My dad is a European immigrant to the US and I don’t know how to speak his native language, which hurts, so why are you making it seem like that sort of thing is only an experience “poc” have?? it’s just a bit silly.

hi! thanks for the ask.

1. to address hc-specific concerns: i list martin as mixed filipino and white because that is how i headcanon him. that is how i self-identify, being mixed european to the point where it's tedious to list out every single country of origin. my headcanon for him is similar. many many people today identify as white without getting into specifics.

2. i'm literally not saying that's an experience only poc have. i'm talking about poc with that experience because it's what i feel comfortable calling attention to, and because i see way more of white authors trying to overstep boundaries by writing about poc. i completely understand that that is an experience for white immigrants as well, as someone who has jewish family that assimilated and is trying to regain that culture, but nowhere did i say that it was exclusive to poc. you are choosing to feel victimised by that post because i didn't specifically mention white immigrants. please think on why that is and whether you need to be at the center of a conversation that was initially about poc.

furthermore, while i get that assimilation can be incredibly painful for white immigrants and their families, most european cultures are celebrated in the united states. it's considered perfectly normal for many european foods to exist in public spaces, but when i brought filipino food to school as a kid, i experienced a boatload of racism. there is a privilege that comes with white immigration that does not for nonwhite immigration—when people speak negatively about immigrants, they almost never mean white immigrants. and besides that, poc who are immigrants or closely related to immigrants have to deal with both immigration issues and issues related to how we look, the language types we speak, etc.

which is not to diminish your experience, but for many european kids, it is always going to be different than it is for those of us with nonwhite features and cultures. there is a difference!! and it feels really disingenuous to me to lump those groups in without discerning the two.

3. it seems like you've gone through a lot of my posts and fanfic to make this ask, and i just want to say in the most genuine way possible, none of me saying "hey what if we put thought into writing and drawing poc" was meant to diminish your experience, but to bring attention to what i and many other poc in the fandom have been trying to bring up for months. i would also encourage you to take a breather before sending any more asks, because i know this is a really sensitive topic for a lot of people.

sometimes when i write, it's not going to be about a certain group of people, and i think that's okay. sometimes when i write, it's going to be centered around my own experiences as a marginalised person, and i also think that's okay. will i try and branch out to write the experiences of others? absolutely! that's why i've put as much research as i have into jon, sasha, and tim's ethnicities as i've written them, and into sasha's identity as a transfeminine person. but anon, i don't owe anyone thoughts on white immigration and loss of european cultures if i don't feel like i have anything to say on the topic. and i'm allowed to talk about poc on a post and just our experiences if that's what i feel is important to bring up.

i hope this is something to think about for you, and i hope you're able to see past your initial thoughts on the matter and try to understand where i'm coming from. my intent was never to ignore or negate anyone's experiences, and i'm sorry if you felt that it was. however, i still agree with my post's original wording, and i don't feel the need to include white people in a post that is explicitly about poc's experiences. i would again also suggest that you take a moment to consider why you feel the need to try and stake your claim to this conversation and this debate when your family's immigration experience is likely very different from many of ours. it is okay to talk about your own experiences, but there are conversations and avenues for that, and it feels really harmful to try and edge your way into ours when we already are ignored so much of the time. thanks

[renaroo]

Other History? More Like Other MYSTERY

as in it’s a MYSTERY how the hell this got past an editor the week before Pride Month are you fucking kidding me?

I was kind of hoping for more than like... a week of being back on tumblr before I breathed fire and ripped a comic book to shreds. But we all know why I’m here.

There are so many preemptive things to get out of the way before I rip into this thing...

John Ridley as a writer in other forms of media has been incredibly accomplished and an important additional voice to entertainment industries. I do not wish to take away from that or to minimize the impact of voices like his.

But, you know, he’s a voice in media. Not the end-all, be-all to all marginalized people worldwide who can substitute his perspective for any nonwhite straight male voice. And I don’t think that has ever been more apparent than the continued spiral down the drain that has been every issue of The Other History of the DC Universe since the first. 

DC’s “new” approach to everything being canon and everything mattering is dumb and filled to the brim with ways it’s going to backfire and reveal itself to be the eye sore of publications that it’s aiming for, but I was curious to see how they would try to incorporate these characters’ long and contentious histories in the comics with the real world issues they often were billed to tackle, and try to fit it into the current pop culture landscape. That was the whole reason I had my eye on this comic to begin with.

By the second issue we were getting some stark warning signs because as much as I appreciated hearing an authentic perspective on how the Teen Titans brand carried on while neglecting its landmark Black teen heroes (Mal Duncan and Karen Beecher), there was a note of cruelty added to the issue that felt otherwise misplaced and uncharacteristic of the tone being set. 

There was no reason to have a significant portion of that issue dedicated to Mal and Karen’s monologues taking some aggressive words out on Roy Harper specifically for being an addict. 

Perhaps it was a quirk of writing from a flawed perspective or a show of how righteous upset and anger could be turned outward to other people suffering in a vy for your own empowerment. 

I’m now pretty sure that wasn’t it at all. I’m pretty sure because it kept getting worse every issue and it’s culminated in today’s issue where the retelling of Renee Montoya’s story managed to be petty, cruel, shockingly pro-police brutality int its adulation of Jim Gordon and especially Harvey Bullock, and managed to make a well-rounded and very beloved Latina lesbian and just retrofit every stereotype she never had before to her without regard for what it did to her story or to the stories of people around her. 

Honestly, lapsed faith and a poke at the damage that Catholic guilt can have on especially queer believers is kind of my jam, so it’s not that I wouldn’t be down for a story with that perspective. I could even understand exploring that with Renee. But not at the expense of her established history.

Which is a question all of its own. Here we have the skeletal structure of Renee’s life events that we have read before (in much better stories), but they are surprisingly out of order and also shockingly twisted in a way to make EVERYONE as unpleasant as possible. 

And in a way that has convinced me that either John Ridley has never read comics featuring Renee, or that he was mandated to change things that had no business being changed.

According to this issue Renee hated Batman and other superheroes? Which, ah, I don’t even know where that could come from. Ever since the animated series where she got started, Renee’s whole bag has been “the acolyte of Jim Gordon, only other cop who supports Batman”. Like I don’t even know how you get around that.

But according to Ridley she’s hated them all along as an extension of her internalized homophobia and self-loathing. Great.

What follows out of that is that apparently? Renee and Batman specifically butted heads over wanting to rehabilitate Harvey Dent? As in Renee wanted to help him and BATMAN was the one flipping out and saying Harvey was a sociopath and couldn’t be helped.

Like. I’m starting to question if Ridley has read Batman comics before. I don’t know where that interpretation could possibly come from? Bruce and Harvey were friends? Bruce has always held out hope for saving Harvey from his psychosis? It’s like. THE storyline for Two-Face.

The cop stuff... I don’t really know how to talk about the cop stuff to be completely honest. If you mention the LA Riots on one page and a few pages later try to frame it so that over policing and methods of brutality weren’t a thing until 9/11... I don’t know what to say to you. 

I’d say maybe I was being ungenerous here except there were two characters who got entire full page spreads about what good cops they were. And one of them was goddamn Harvey Bullock with the explicit commentary that Renee USED to be uncomfortable with his torture methods and general brutality but figured it was “okay” because he knew how “innocent people screamed different” and that he “never collared someone and it didn’t stick” because. Y’know. Police violence and falsifying evidence never go hand in hand. what the actual fuck ever right?

The timeline for Renee and Kate’s relationship is also completely changed which means that we get to add a trope I just LOVE as a lesbian personally, which is that lesbians can’t keep relationships and can’t keep from cheating on their loving partners. Especially when they are butch. 

And I’m not talking about Renee cheating on Kate. Oh, no. Ridley decided Kate was the Other Woman during Renee’s relationship with Daria. 

And just.. the cruel commentary that Renee had about both Kate and Daria throughout. It made my skin crawl. The way she talked about other women in general made my skin crawl. “Uncomplicated women” “Broken souls” “Can’t be with someone better than yourself”

So I actually planned to go into a full rage post about just the queer content because 1. my lane and 2. it honestly affected me so bad I was shaking and tearing up in anger a bit. Every single friend I know who loves Kate and Renee, see themselves in Kate and Renee, have been the same kind of mess I am after this.

The NASTINESS of the internal monologue. I don’t know how to explain it more than this is how poorly men think of flf and to have one use a character so meaningful to the community to spout this hatefulness has revolted me in a way I... haven’t had happen to me for a while.

I was going to talk about the weirdness of just... randomly deciding to retcon Renee’s parents into being undocumented when that’s never been a thing before and just doing NOTHING with it the whole while after. Or how it’s pretty questionable how Renee suddenly became so adherently Catholic when it’s never been portrayed like that before (that’s Hel B’s bag, JPV if you squint) but it’s entwined with any of her commentary on her ethnicity p sus too but I don’t have the nuance for that discussion right now.

Rena Rants are back and what a fucking JOKE this comic was. 

I didn’t pay for it and neither should you.

P.S. bringing back Tim Fox and calling him “Jace” is dumb as fuck too

[bookcoversalt]

Have you noticed the latest edition of Charlie Bowater can only draw one (1) face? She did The Princess Will Save You and Cast In Firelight both YA Fantasy set to be released this year. And they are how you say... the same fucking cover

Ah yes so you saw the same tweet I did

I know I literally just posted that we cannot outlaw book covers from looking like each other, but ! Oof!

The only thing that softens the blow here is that Charlie has improved at representing nonwhite features such that characters look like POC rather than tan white people, although,, that bar was low. Anybody remember the ACOTAR coloring book.

(Would you have guessed that 2/3 of these people are nonwhite? Or even that they’re supposed to be three different men? I guess all the men in Prythian have the same haircut?)

But that minor victory is mostly lost in the quagmires of the fact that Charlie’s style is to give everyone instagram face:

I wouldn’t even call this “Sameface” necessarily: that implies limitation, that an artist is only capable of drawing a single facial structure competently. Bowater is incredibly technically talented, she just chooses to give everyone catlike fae eyes and the cheekbones of a starving nymph. (My previous post on this here.)

But I don’t really blame her for that, or for these hilariously identical, nearly devoid of personality covers. Artists are allowed to do whatever they want. Artists who make art for covers are being art directed by designers and marketing teams who bear responsibility for how the finished pieces turn out.

No, this is our fault, as a community and an industry and..... society, kind of, for valuing character portraits that are “pretty” (“pretty” being an extremely loaded, culturally subjective concept) over art that actually Says Something About The Story. Bowater’s style happens to dovetail perfectly with what we currently collectively find pretty, and so we’ve put her art on a pedestal at the cost of everything else art can or should do for our stories.

And this is understandable: in contemporary western culture, pretty is a value unto itself. Seeing our characters portrayed as pretty denotes them as special, as smart, as powerful. It’s almost impossible to de-program ourselves from that reaction. There are approximately five kajillion studies on how beautiful people are at personal and professional advantages; how they’re perceived to be happier, healthier, more successful, and how those perceptions can translate into realities. (Nevermind how thinness and whiteness enter that equation, see above note about “pretty”.) I would love to see more “average” or weird- looking characters abound (and be accurately visually represented) in the YA/ Genre lit sphere, but for now... everyone is pretty.

Which sometimes means everyone is pretty boring.

But that’s just the specific, "What’s the deal with Bowater’s success in book circles and her style and all the sameiness” part of this equation. What if we backed up and asked: why character art at all? Beyond a question of “pretty”-ness (and general obvious Artistic Quality), why do we gravitate towards it, what's the purpose of it, how does it fall flat in a general sense, and how can it be utilized more effectively?

This is something I think about all the time. I follow writers on social media (because..... I am a writer on social media, regrettably), and we have an enormous collective boner for character art. “Getting fanart [of the characters]” is one of the achievement pinnacles constantly cited when people get or want to get published. Commissioning character art is something we reward ourselves with, or save up for (WHICH IS GOOD AND CORRECT. FREE ART IS GREAT BUT DO NOT SOLICIT IT. PAY YOUR ARTISTS). And like???? Same????? We love our stories because we’re invested in our characters. Most humans, even prose writers, are visual creatures to some extent, and no matter how happy we are with our text-based art, it’s exciting to see our creations exist in that form. So we turn that art into promo material and we advocate for it on our covers-- because it’s so meaningful to us! It goes with the story perfectly!! Look at my dumb beautiful children!!!!!

But on an emotional level, it’s hard to grasp that it only means something to us. Particularly when you take into account the aforementioned vast landscape of beautiful visual blandness of many characters (in the YA/ genre lit sphere, that’s pretty much all I’m ever talking about), character art can be like baby photos. If you know the baby, if that baby is your new niece or your friend’s kid, if you’ve held them and their parent texts you updates when they do cute shit, you’re probably excited to see that baby photo. But unless it’s exceptionally cute, a random stranger’s baby photo isn’t likely to invoke an emotional reaction other than “this is why I don’t get on facebook.”

Seeing art of characters they don’t know might intrigue a reader, but especially if the characters or art are unremarkable-looking, it’s doing a hell of a lot more for the people who already have an emotional attachment to that character than anybody else. And that’s fine. Art for a small, invested audience is incredibly rewarding. But like the parent who cannot see why you don’t think their baby is THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BABY IN THE WORLD???? I think we have trouble divesting our emotional reaction to character art from its actual marketing value, which.... is often pretty minimal. This is my hill to die on #143:

Character portraits, even beautiful ones, are meaningless as a marketing tool without additional context or imagery. 

I love character art! I’m not saying it should not exist or that it’s worthless! Even art that appeals to only the one single person who made it has value and the right to exist. And part of this conversation is how important for POC to see themselves on covers, whether illustrations or stock imagery, particularly in YA/kidlit. I’m not saying character portrait covers are “bad”. 

I am saying that I have seen dozens and dozens of sets of character art for characters who look interchangeable, and it has never driven me to preorder a book. (Also one character portrait for a high-profile 2019 debut that was clearly just a painting of Amanda Seyfriend. You know the one. There’s nothing wrong with faceclaims but lmfao, girl,,,,)

I’m sure that’s not true for everyone! I am incredibly picky about art. It’s my job. There’s nothing wrong with your card deck of cell-shaded boys of ambiguous age and ethnicity who all have the same button nose and smirk if it Sparks Joy for you.

But if your goal is not only to delight yourself, but to sell books, it’s in your best interest to remember that art, like writing, is a form of communication. The publishing industry runs on pitches: querys, blurbs, proposals, self-promo tweets. What if we applied that logic to our visuals? How can we utilize our character design and art to communicate as much about our stories as possible, in the most enticing way?

Social media has already driven the embrace of this concept in a very general sense. Authors are now supposed to have ~ aesthetics. “Picspams” or graphics, modular collages that function as mini moodboards, are commonplace. But the labor intensity and relative scarcity of character art visible in bookish circles, even on covers, means that application of marketing sensibility to it is less intuitive than throwing together a pinterest board.

Since we were talking about it earlier, WICKED SAINTS, as a case study of a recent “successful” fantasy YA debut, arguably owed a lot of its early social media momentum to fanart.

(Early fanart by @warickaart)

The most frequently drawn character, Malachiasz, has long hair, claws, and distinctive face tattoos. WS has a strong aesthetic in general, but those features clearly marked his fanart as him in a way even someone unfamiliar with the book could clearly track across different styles. Different interpretations of his tattoos from different artists even became a point of interest.

(Art by Jaria Rambaran, also super early days of WS Being A Thing)

Aside from distinctiveness, it's a clear visual representation of his history as a cult member, his monstrous powers, and the story’s dark, medieval tone. The above image is also a great example of character interaction, something missing from straightforward portraits, that communicates a dynamic. Character dynamics draw people into stories: enemies-to-lovers, friends-to-lovers, childhood rivals, platonic life partners, love triangles, devoted siblings, exes who still carry the flame-- there’s a reason we codify these into tropes, and integrate that language and shared knowledge into our marketing. For another example in that vein, I really love this art by @MabyMin, commissioned by Gina Chen:

The wrist grip! The fancy outfits! These are two nobles who hate each other and want to bone and I am sold. 

In terms of true portraits, the best recent example I can think of is the set @NicoleDeal did for Roshani Chokshi’s GILDED WOLVES (I believe as a preorder incentive of some kind?): 

They showcase settings, props, and poses that all communicate the characters’ interests, skills, and personality, as well as the glamorous, elaborate aesthetic of the overall story. Even elements in the gold borders change, alluding to other plot points and symbology.

For painterly accuracy in character portraits on covers, I love SPIN THE DAWN. The heroine looks like a beautiful badass, yes, but the thoughtful, detailed rendering of every element, soft textures, and dynamic, fluid composition form a really cohesive, stunning illustration that presents an intriguing collection of story elements.

The devil isn’t always in the details, though: stark, moody, highly stylized or graphic art with an emphasis on textural contrast and bold color and shape rather than representational accuracy can communicate a lot (emotionally and tonally) while pretty much foregoing realism.

The new Lunar Chronicles covers are actually the best examples I found of this (Trying to stay within the realm of existing bookish art rather than branch into All Art Of Human Figures Forever):

Taking cues from styles more typical of the comics and video game industries.  (Games and comics, as visual mediums, are sources of incredible character art and I highly recommend following artists in those industries if you want to See More Cool Art On Your Timeline.)

TL;DR: Character art and design, as a marketing tool (even an incidental one) should be as unique to your story and your characters as possible, and tell us about the story in ways that make us want to read it. I tried to give examples because there are so many ways to do this, and so many different kinds of art, and I could give many more! But I’m bored now. So to circle all the way back:

These are not just bad because they look like each other, although that is embarrassing and illuminating. These are bad covers (although,,,,, PRINCESS is the far worse offender, at least FIRELIGHT suggests a thoughtful cultural analogue) because a desire for Pretty Character Art overrode the basic cover function to tell us about the story. We get no sense of who these people are, what their relationships are, what these books are about beyond the most general genre, or why we might care. The expressions are vague, the characters generic-looking, the compositions uninteresting and the colors failing to be indicative of anything in particular. 

They’re somebody else’s baby pictures.

(And yes, that’s the CRUEL PRINCE font on PRINCESS. I better not have to do a roundup post but it’s on thin fucking ice.)

[santaclausdeadindian]

Sorry for doing it this way, I think OP deleted their post or blocked me like a mature, balanced person would, so I have to tag you in

@mr-laugh

Oh boy, lot to unpack here.

So you didn’t even know there were that many subgenres of fantasy, one of the most popular classifications of fiction on the planet... And you think you know enough to tell ANYBODY what classic fantasy is?

And where exactly I attempted to do that, huh?

If you don’t even know the most common subgenres of this vast pool of fiction, why are you jumping into this discussion? You just admitted you don’t know anything!

There is no discussion, there is a stupid ass post. Don't flatter yourself, you don't know jack shit.

Me not knowing what exactly are the precize subgenres of a genre of literature, which, btw, are completely arbitrary and for your information, sword&magic is a legitimate category, has absolutely nothing to do with what that post you were so keen on agreeing with above. It was you who said pretty much any classic fantasy is like that: some poorly written, self-indulgent and borderline racist.

Did ya read the link, buddy? Howard talked about knowing what burning black man smelled like. He was quite approving of these things! And the books are pretty racist, it’s not hard to see, unless you ain’t looking.

Yes, I started reading and by the end of the first paragraph I was convinced he was ahorribly racist man. And? Still doesn't change the fact, that for my 12 year old self, there was nothing racist about it. I definetly wasn't looking for it, that much you got right. If I'd read it again, I'm sure I'd catch on to it now, that I know what kind of asshole he was. So the implied racism would be there. You got a point for that.

Rugged individualism? It always amuses me how that argument always pops out of the mouths of guys who are aping what they’ve heard their buddies say. If ten thousand mouths shout “rugged individualism”, how individualistic are they?

Then you should amuse yourself by looking up why this thing crops up as of late. It's coming from certain, supremely racist yet unaware of it publications that claim ridiculous shit like "rugged individualism" is a hallmark of white supremacy, among other, equally laughable things, like punctuality. It's a joke.

Again, I will give Howard to you, if someone that racist writes a black man saving the hero of the story, I bet there was something else still there to make it wrong.

Conan’s not some avatar of rugged individualism.

Uhm, yeah, he pretty much all that.

He’s as unreal and unrealistic as the dragons are,

It's called fantasy for a reason, buddy.

but more dangerous because White Men model their ideas of reality on Big Man Heroes like him;

Glad you are totally not racist, yo!!! It's such a relief that White Men are the only ones with this terrible behavior of looking up to larger than life, mythic superpeople and nobody else. Imagine what it would be like, if we would have some asshole from say, hindu indian literature massacering demons called Rakshassas, by the tens of thousands, or some bullshit japanese warlord would snatch out arrows from the air, or a chienese bodyguard would mow down hundreds of barbaric huns without dropping a sweat, or some middle eastern hero would fight literal gods and their magical beasts in some quest for eternal life.

it's a poison that weakens us, distracting us from actually trying to solve the world’s issues, or banding together to deal with shit.

This is what you just said. It's up to the white man, to get their shit together, be not racist and solve the world's problems, because those poor other people's just can't do it. If we would just not be oh, so racist, then China would surely stop with the genocides they are doing now, or blowing more than half the greenhouse emissions into the athmosphere, the muslims would stop throwing their gays from rooftops or ramming trucks into crowds and would just start treating women as equals, India's massive rape problem would be gone, subsaharan African would be magically bereft of the host of atrocities committed there on a daily, yeah, you sure have that nonracism down, buddy!

A rugged individualist would be smart enough to realize that even the most individualistic person needs others; no man’s an island, and a loner is easier to kill.

Individualism doesn't mean at all what you think it means, it's a cluster of widely differeing philosophies that puts the individual ahead of the group or state, it's ranging from anarchism to liberalism and is also has nothing to do with my point.

Central Europe?  What, Germany?  Because let me tell you, historically they are SUPER concerned about race!

Germany traditionally considered western european, central europe would be the people stuck between them and the russians, to put it very loosely. We are equally nonplussed by the self-flagellating white guilt complex and the woe me victim complex of the west. We did none of the shit those meanie white people did to the nonwhites and suffered everyting any poc ever did and then some. We don't give a shit about your color, we care about what culture you are from and if you respect our values.

I’m an American from a former Confederate state; trust me, race is everything.  It always is.

No it really isn't. How old are you? Asking without condescension, genuinly curious, because if you are in your low twenties at most, it's understandable why you think like this.

See that hike? Do you know what happened at that time that made virtually all american media suddenly go all in with racism?

Occupy Wall Street, that's what. It's a brilliant way to sow victimhood and hate and desperation amongst the people who have one common enemy, the powers that be, the banking sector, the politicians, the megacorporations.

Can't really blame you if you are in your early 20's at most, you grew up with this bullshit hammered into you. If you are older, step out of your echochamber please!

If you actually believe, that mankind doesn't progress naturally towards a more accepting society purely on the merit of there being more good people than bad and sharing a similar living with all the hardships in life, seeing that our prejudices inherited by our parents are baseless, that's how we progress, not virtue signalling courses and regressive policies. I was raised as any other kid, I had a deep resentment towards the neighbouring nations, I said vile, racist shit against people who I actually share a lot of genes with, of which fact I was in deep denial about, and then as I gradually got exposed more and more actual people of these groups, I started to realize I was wrong and everybody should be judged by their individual merits. It works throughout the generations, my grandma was thought songs about Hitler and how all jews are evil in school, she legit thought all black people at least in Africa are cannibals and shit, my mother stillsays shit that would get her cancelled in the USA, and I will probably have a mixed race kid as we stand now.

This whole racism is an eternal problem is laughable and disingenuous and I am actually sorry for you that you feel like that.

Moving on. As for Dany, the “noble white girl sold to scary dark foreign man” is a very popular trope, especially in exploitation films, which Martin draws on much more heavily than most authors do.

No, he fucking doesn't. I already wrote a bunch of examples from the books you seeminly ignore willfully. First of all, she is sold to those olive skinned savages by a white man, who is a terrible, increadibly evil man. He want's to fuck the then 11-12 ish Dany so bad, she picks his slave most resembling her and rapes her repeatedly, "until the madness pass." He also maimes children and traines them as disposable slave spies by the hundreds. There is no boundaries colour here, GRRM prtrays all kinds of people as reprehensible, evil and disgusting. Just like you can find plenty of examples to the opposite.

What is he drawing from your exploitation movies exactly? He writes about the human anture, he writes about the human heart at war with itself, that's his central philosophy of writing.

ASOFAI is basically just a porn movie with complicated feudal politics obscuring it, which is probably why it worked so well as an HBO series (up until the last two seasons or so.)

There is no gratuitous sex scene in the books, the rapes are described as rapes, they are horrible, they are very shortly described and usually just alluded to.

The people commiting them are not put into generous lights and one of the single most harrowing stories hidden behind the grand happenings of the plot is a girl named Jeyne Poole, whose suffering although never shown, is very much pointed out, along with the hypocrisy of the people who only fight to try and save her, because they think her a different person.

Honestly, if you actually read the books and they came of to you as porn, you might want to do some soulsearching.Btw, the HBO series was a terrible adaptation, it immedietly started to go further and further from the books with every passing season and the showmakers made it very clear to everybody, that they didn't understand the very much pacifist and humanist themes of Martin. And neither did you.

We also get no indication Essos will eat it when Winter comes; hell, they seem to not know Winter exists, given the way people act, even though that is also unrealistic and weird.  Essos was just super badly designed, and Dany is a terribly boring character.

to be continued

[thenixkat]

Nix Reviews: Animorphs

Summary: Five teens take a shortcut home, run into an alien, and get the power to transform into animals. They are tasked with saving the world from a covert alien invasion.

Score: 1.3/10

Sexual Assult Drinking Game: at least 5*

(+) Very iconic

-has some of the most creative alien designs in scifi

- the hork-bajir are wonderful

- actually very good fuel for fanfic inspiration

- the introduction of James and his friends

- a decent start for baby furries

(-) Really needed to go through a few passes with an editor b4 being published

- is the opposite of educational

---frequently gets basic, easy to research things about animals wrong in a series where animal biology/behavior is a significant factor ie. dolphins don’t have blubber

---gets everything extra wrong with prehistoric animals. Absolutely everything. Looked like they based an entire book off of the Jurassic Park sequels

-both blatant and harmful animal biases ie. bugs and reptiles are not scary or ugly and predators aren’t evil

-Written as White and male default as you can get regardless of the viewpoint character

- Filled with inconsistencies and plotholes

-literally so lazy that a deus ex machina was turned into a recurring character

- Once you reach book 7 with the reveal of a godlike being who does whatever he wants and wants the main characters to succeed there are no longer any emotional or narrative stakes in the series

-Also really fucking racist across the board

---there is a book where an alien species that is uniformly described as ugly and stupid by every viewpoint character and the writers themselves out of universe are directly compared and paralleled to Black people

---said aliens are stupid b/c they don’t speak or understand English well, except for the rare smart ones that speak properly.

---said aliens are also stupid b/c they can’t read English

---every indigenous character shown is incredibly superstitious and immediately believes that the group of mostly White American monolingual kids are spirits from their respective local religion for no known reason

---Makes an African American character a slave owner in one of the alternate timelines and makes a Jewish character an out and out fascist in that timeline as well

---When directly talking about racism in the series is very “Colorblind” about it which is bad

---Introduces an Asian character alongside a group of White characters and for some reason, the Asian character is the only one who’s name is forgotten

---It’s so White. There are literally more specifically blond White characters than nonWhite characters overall

-The series is really in love with the idea of genocide as the solution to conflicts

-Series nerfs every single nonprotagonist to fit a poorly thought out plot instead of letting the story develop organically

-It’s way too long with so much filler for the story they were telling

-Thinks it’s deeper than it actually is

-Assumes the audience has the memory of a goldfish

-The character most frequently used as the authors’ mouthpiece justifies the use of slavery and genocide in their narration

-Writers think that saying ‘respect the differently-abled’ covers their asses for all the ableist shit in the series. It does not

-the andalites receive no narrative punishment for their genocidal actions and racist beliefs and never apologize to their victims or pay reparations

-There is an incredible selection of sexism on display from the male default writing to the tough girl characters who are ‘not like other girls’ to turning compent female characters into shrieking helpless harpies once they aren’t useful to the plot at hand or need to make unlikable before killing them off for mainpain

- Does that really annoying, nonsensical, and boring ‘Humans are Special’ thing that is the bane of good scifi

- Fails in its xenofictional aspects by the writers’ either refusal to go outside of their comfort zone or by their sheer lack of talent

Overall: I could never recommend this series on good conscience. Partially because of racist/ableist messages and partially because of just how bad it is at the science part of science fiction that it feels like something really harmful for children to read in case they internalize the worst of its bullshit. There are much much better things out there to show/read to children about war and grey morality, please find them. If you still do wanna read Animorphs, save yer money and find it free online.

*edit on the sexual assault number. I’d forgotten the implied sexual assault of at the very least 2 hosts of Visser One. Second edit I forgot to include sexually assaulted dudes and rape vis deception. 

[blackfreethinkers]

Two kindergartners in Utah told a Latino boy that President Trump would send him back to Mexico, and teenagers in Maine sneered "Ban Muslims" at a classmate wearing a hijab. In Tennessee, a group of middle-schoolers linked arms, imitating the president's proposed border wall as they refused to let nonwhite students pass. In Ohio, another group of middle-schoolers surrounded a mixed-race sixth-grader and, as she confided to her mother, told the girl: "This is Trump country."

Since Trump's rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim, according to the analysis. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period.

Although many hateful episodes garnered coverage just after the election, The Post found that Trump-connected persecution of children has never stopped. Even without the huge total from November 2016, an average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. Still, because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.

“It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected,” said Ashanty Bonilla, 17, a Mexican American high school junior in Idaho who faced so much ridicule from classmates last year that she transferred. “They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

Asked about Trump’s effect on student behavior, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham noted that first lady Melania Trump — whose “Be Best” campaign denounces online harassment — had encouraged kids worldwide to treat one another with respect.

First lady Melania Trump speaks at the White House in May 2018 about her “Be Best” campaign, which denounces online harassment. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

“She knows that bullying is a universal problem for children that will be difficult to stop in its entirety,” Grisham wrote in an email, “but Mrs. Trump will continue her work on behalf of the next generation despite the media’s appetite to blame her for actions and situations outside of her control.”

Most schools don’t track the Trump bullying phenomenon, and researchers didn’t ask about it in a federal survey of 6,100 students in 2017, the most recent year with available data. One in five of those children, ages 12 to 18, reported being bullied at school, a rate unchanged since the previous count in 2015.

However, a 2016 online survey of over 10,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade educators by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that more than 2,500 “described specific incidents of bigotry and harassment that can be directly traced to election rhetoric,” although the overwhelming majority never made the news. In 476 cases, offenders used the phrase “build the wall.” In 672, they mentioned deportation.

Withrow University High School

Someone sprayed hateful graffiti across campus, declaring "F- - - N-words and Faggots" and "Trump." The graffiti also threatened gay and black students and featured multiple swastikas -- the latter often painted alongside the president's last name.

Lewiston High School

After Ashanty Bonilla, 17, tweeted criticism of Trump supporters who visit Mexico, a classmate posted her message on Snapchat alongside a racist response and a Confederate flag. The next day, classmates heckled the teen with racist jeers, tied a rope to the back of her car and wrote "Republican Trump 2020" on the back window.

Amon Carter-Riverside High School

Georgia Clark, an English teacher in Fort Worth, tweeted at President Trump asking him to remove undocumented immigrants from her high school. She mistakenly believed her messages were private.

For Cielo Castor, who is Mexican American, the experience at Kamiakin High in Kennewick, Wash., was searing. The day after the election, a friend told Cielo, then a sophomore, that he was glad Trump won because Mexicans were stealing American jobs. A year later, when the president was mentioned during her American literature course, she said she didn't support him and a classmate who did refused to sit next to her. “‘I don’t want to be around her,’ ” Cielo recalled him announcing as he opted for the floor instead. Then, on “America night” at a football game in October 2018 during Cielo’s senior year, schoolmates in the student section unfurled a “Make America Great Again” flag. Led by the boy who wouldn’t sit beside Cielo, the teenagers began to chant: “Build — the — wall!” Horrified, she confronted the instigator. “You can’t be doing that,” Cielo told him. He ignored her, she recalled, and the teenagers around him booed her. A cheerleading coach was the lone adult who tried to make them stop. “I felt like I was personally attacked. And it wasn’t like they were attacking my character. They were attacking my ethnicity, and it’s not like I can do anything about that.”

— Cielo Castor

After a photo of the teenagers with the flag appeared on social media, news about what had happened infuriated many of the school’s Latinos, who made up about a quarter of the 1,700-member student body. Cielo, then 17, hoped school officials would address the tension. When they didn’t, she attended that Wednesday’s school board meeting. “I don’t feel cared for,” she told the members, crying. A day later, the superintendent consoled her and the principal asked how he could help, recalled Cielo, now a college freshman. Afterward, school staff members addressed every class, but Hispanic students were still so angry that they organized a walkout. Some students heckled the protesters, waving MAGA caps at them. At the end of the day, Cielo left the school with a white friend who’d attended the protest; they passed an underclassman she didn’t know. “Look,” the boy said, “it’s one of those f---ing Mexicans.” She heard that school administrators — who declined to be interviewed for this article — suspended the teenager who had led the chant, but she doubts he has changed. Reached on Instagram, the teenager refused to talk about what happened, writing in a message that he didn’t want to discuss the incident “because it is in the past and everyone has moved on from it.” At the end, he added a sign-off: “Trump 2020.”

President Trump’s rhetoric has been condemned as racist and xenophobic since his candidacy began in 2015. Here is what he’s said. (The Washington Post)

Just as the president has repeatedly targeted Latinos, so, too, have school bullies. Of the incidents The Post tallied, half targeted Hispanics.

In one of the most extreme cases of abuse, a 13-year-old in New Jersey told a Mexican American schoolmate, who was 12, that “all Mexicans should go back behind the wall.” A day later, on June 19, 2019, the 13-year-old assaulted the boy and his mother, Beronica Ruiz, punching him and beating her unconscious, said the family’s attorney, Daniel Santiago. He wonders to what extent Trump’s repeated vilification of certain minorities played a role.

More than 300 Trump-inspired harassment incidents reported by news outlets from 2016-2019

Anti-Hispanic: 45%

Anti-black: 23%

Anti-Semitic: 7%

Anti-Muslim: 8%

Anti-LGBT: 4%

Anti-Trump: 14%

Note: Some incidents targeted multiple groups and, in other cases, the ethnicity/gender/religion of the intended target was unclear. Figures may not precisely add up because of rounding.

“When the president goes on TV and is saying things like Mexicans are rapists, Mexicans are criminals — these children don’t have the cognitive ability to say, ‘He’s just playing the role of a politician,’ ” Santiago argued. “The language that he’s using matters.” Ruiz’s son, who is now seeing a therapist, continues to endure nightmares from an experience that may take years to overcome. But experts say that discriminatory language can, on its own, harm children, especially those of color who may already feel marginalized. “It causes grave damage, as much physical as psychological,” said Elsa Barajas, who has counseled more than 1,000 children in her job at the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health. As a result, she has seen Hispanic students suffer from sleeplessness, lose interest in school, and experience inexplicable stomach pain and headaches.

For Ashanty Bonilla, the damage began with the response to a single tweet she shared 10 months ago. “Unpopular opinion,” Ashanty, then 16 and a sophomore at Lewiston High School in rural Idaho, wrote on April 9. “People who support Trump and go to Mexico for vacation really piss me off. Sorry not sorry.” Some of Ashanty Bonilla’s classmates at Lewiston High in rural Idaho harassed her last April after she tweeted a comment critical of Trump supporters. (Rajah Bose/For The Washington Post) A schoolmate, who is white, took a screen shot of her tweet and posted it to Snapchat, along with a Confederate flag. “Unpopular opinion but: people that are from Mexico and come in to America illegally or at all really piss me off,” he added in a message that spread rapidly among students. The next morning, as Ashanty arrived at school, half a dozen boys, including the one who had written the message, stood nearby. “You’re illegal. Go back to Mexico,” she heard one of them say. “F--- Mexicans.” Ashanty, shaken but silent, walked past as a friend yelled at the boys to shut up. In a 33,000-person town that is 94 percent white, Ashanty, whose father is half-black and whose mother is Mexican American, had always worked to fit in. She attended every football game and won a school spirit award as a freshman. She straightened her hair and dyed it blond, hoping to look more like her friends. “It’s gotten way worse since Trump got elected. They hear it. They think it’s okay. The president says it. . . . Why can’t they?”

— Ashanty Bonilla

She had known those boys who’d heckled her since they were little. For her 15th birthday the year before, some had danced at her quinceañera. A friend drove her off campus for lunch, but when they pulled back into the parking lot, Ashanty spotted people standing around her car. A rope had been tied from the back of the Honda Pilot to a pickup truck. “Republican Trump 2020,” someone had written in the dust on her back window. Hands trembling, Ashanty tried to untie the rope but couldn’t. She heard the laughing, sensed the cellphone cameras pointed at her. She began to weep. Lewiston’s principal, Kevin Driskill, said he and his staff met with the boys they knew were involved, making clear that “we have zero tolerance for any kind of actions like that.” The incidents, he suspected, stemmed mostly from ignorance. “Our lack of diversity probably comes with a lack of understanding,” Driskill said, but he added that he’s encouraged by the school district’s recent creation of a community group — following racist incidents on other campuses — meant to address those issues. That effort came too late for Ashanty. Some friends supported her, but others told her the boys were just joking. Don’t ruin their lives. She seldom attended classes the last month of school. That summer, she started having migraines and panic attacks. In August, amid her spiraling despair, Ashanty swallowed 27 pills from a bottle of antidepressants. A helicopter rushed her to a hospital in Spokane, Wash., 100 miles away. After that, she began seeing a therapist and, along with the friend who defended her, transferred to another school. Sometimes, she imagines how different life might be had she never written that tweet, but Ashanty tries not to blame herself and has learned to take more pride in her heritage. She just wishes the president understood the harm his words inflict. Even Trump’s last name has become something of a slur to many children of color, whether they’ve heard it shouted at them in hallways or, in her case, seen it written on the back window of a car. “It means,” she said, “you don’t belong.”

Georgia Clark taught English at Amon Carter-Riverside High School in Fort Worth, where a student accused her of racism. (Allison V. Smith/For The Washington Post) Three weeks into the 2018-19 school year, Miracle Slover's English teacher, she alleges, ordered black and Hispanic students to sit in the back of the classroom at their Fort Worth high school. At the time, Miracle was a junior. Georgia Clark, her teacher at Amon Carter-Riverside, often brought up Trump, Miracle said. He was a good person, she told the class, because he wanted to build a wall. “Every day was something new with immigration,” said Miracle, now 18, who has a black mother and a mixed-race father. “That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.” Some students tried to film Clark, and others complained to administrators, but none of it made a difference, Miracle said. Clark, an employee of the Fort Worth system since 1998, kept talking. Clark, who denies the teenager’s allegations, is one of more than 30 educators across the country accused of using the president’s name or rhetoric to harass students since he announced his candidacy, the Post analysis found. In Clark’s class, Miracle stayed quiet until late spring 2019. That day, she walked in wearing her hair “puffy,” split into two high buns. Clark, she said, told her it looked “nappy, like Marge off ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Unable to smother an angry reply, Miracle landed in the principal’s office. An administrator asked her to write a witness statement, and in it, she finally let go, scrawling her frustration across seven pages. “I just got tired of it,” she said. “I wrote a ton.” Still, Miracle said, school officials took no action until six weeks later, when Clark, 69, tweeted at Trump — in what she thought were private messages — requesting help deporting undocumented immigrants in Fort Worth schools. The posts went viral, drawing national condemnation. Clark was fired. “Every day was something new with immigration. That Trump needs to take [immigrants] away. They do drugs, they bring drugs over here. They cause violence.”

— Miracle Slover, referring to Georgia Clark, her former English teacher

Not always, though, are offenders removed from the classroom. The day after the 2016 election, Donnie Jones Jr.’s daughter was walking down a hallway at her Florida high school when, she says, a teacher warned her and two friends — all sophomores, all black — that Trump would “send you back to Africa.” The district suspended the teacher for three days and transferred him to another school. Just a few days later in California, a physical education teacher told a student that he would be deported under Trump. Two years ago in Maine, a substitute teacher referenced the president’s wall and promised a Lebanese American student, “You’re getting kicked out of my country.” More than a year later in Texas, a school employee flashed a coin bearing the word “ICE” at a Hispanic student. “Trump,” he said, “is working on a law where he can deport you.” Sometimes, Jones said, he doesn’t recognize America. “People now will say stuff that a couple of years ago they would not dare say,” Jones argued. He fears what his two youngest children, ages 11 and 9, might hear in their school hallways, especially if Trump is reelected. Now a senior, Miracle doesn’t regret what she wrote about Clark. Although the furor that followed forced Miracle to switch schools and quit her beloved dance team, she would do it again, she said. Clark’s punishment, her public disgrace, was worth it. About a week before Miracle’s 18th birthday, her mother checked Facebook to find a flurry of notifications. Friends were messaging to say that Clark had appealed her firing, and that the Texas education commissioner had intervened. Reluctant to spoil the birthday, Jowona Powell waited several days to tell her daughter, who doesn’t use social media. Citing a minor misstep in the school board’s firing process, the commissioner had ordered Carter-Riverside to pay Clark one year’s salary — or give the former teacher her job back.

A snapshot of the harassment in 2019

In the three months after the president tweeted on July 14, 2019, that four minority congresswomen should "go back” to the countries they came from, more than a dozen incidents of Trump-related school bullying — including several that used his exact language — were reported in the press.

Mahtomedi High School & Como Park Senior High School

During a soccer game, students taunted a majority Asian-American team (which also included at least one Hispanic player) by telling them to go back to their countries and calling them "Asian food names."

Baldwin High School & Piper High School

During a volleyball game, students told black players on the court to go back to where they came from and made monkey noises at them.

Barack and Michelle Obama Ninth Grade Center

After a 14-year-old failed to address a staffer with "Yes, sir," the man showed the student a coin with "ICE" written on it and said, "Even though you are a citizen, Trump is working on a law where he can deport you, too, because of your mom’s status." The man later lost his job.

Everett Alvarez High School

In an apparent prank against a schoolmate, students created a fake Twitter account — which praised Adolf Hitler and Trump in its bio — and tweeted out racist remarks against a black high school coach.

Frontier High School

Students waving "Make America Great Again" flags disrupted a meeting of the school's Gay Straight Alliance, breaking up the gathering by shouting slurs before following the group's members to the parking lot.

Edward Little High School

Students yelled "Build the wall!" and "Ban Muslims!" as a 16-year-old Muslim girl walked through the hallways.

A 16-year-old student was arrested after posting on social media -- shortly after the deadly mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso — a photo of a pickup displaying a Trump flag, a Confederate flag and several guns. He captioned the post, "west harrison ain't ready for round 2."

Fans told one Hispanic player on the opposing team to “go back to your country” and called others “f---ing beaner” and "wetback" during a soccer game.

During a game in which a student was accused of using a racial slur againt a black player, fans also waved a Trump sign and chanted "America" when their team scored.

Cheerleaders from a largely white school held up a sign that read "Make America Great Again" and "Trump the Leopards" before a football game against a much more diverse school.

Before a football game, players ran through a banner reading "Make America Great Again Trump Those Patriots," triggering a backlash.

At least two minority students were bullied — in separate incidents — because the district allowed students to display a Trump banner at a high school football game, according to parents and school board members.

After students painted the school rock with rainbows to celebrate National Coming Out Day, someone painted over it with "Trump 2020," "MAGA 2020," "NRA" and an expletive. Later, two students — one black, one white — got into a fight about the issue.

During a soccer game, students taunted a majority Asian-American team (which also included at least one Hispanic player) by telling them to go back to their countries and calling them "Asian food names."

During a volleyball game, students told black players on the court to go back to where they came from and made monkey noises at them.

After a 14-year-old failed to address a staffer with "Yes, sir," the man showed the student a coin with "ICE" written on it and said, "Even though you are a citizen, Trump is working on a law where he can deport you, too, because of your mom’s status." The man later lost his job.

In an apparent prank against a schoolmate, students created a fake Twitter account — which praised Adolf Hitler and Trump in its bio — and tweeted out racist remarks against a black high school coach. Jordyn Covington stood when she heard the jeers. “Monkeys!” “You don’t belong here.” “Go back to where you came from!” From atop the bleachers that day in October, Jordyn, 15, could see her Piper High School volleyball teammates on the court in tears. The sobbing varsity players were all black, all from Kansas City, Kan., like her. Who was yelling? Jordyn wondered. She peered at the students in the opposing section. Most of them were white. “It was just sad,” said Jordyn, who plays for Piper’s junior varsity team. “And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.” Go back? To where? Jordyn, her friends and Piper’s nine black players were all born in the United States. “Just like everyone else,” Jordyn said. “Just like white people.” “It was just sad. And why? Why did it have to happen to us? We weren’t doing anything. We were simply playing volleyball.” The game, played at an overwhelmingly white rural high school, came three months after Trump tweeted that four minority congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” It was Jordyn’s first experience with racism, she said. But it was not the first time that fans at a school sports game had used the president to target students of color.

The Post found that players, parents or fans have used his name or words in at least 48 publicly reported cases, hurling hateful slogans at students competing in elementary, middle and high school games in 26 states. The venom has been shouted on football gridirons and soccer fields, on basketball and volleyball courts. Nearly 90 percent of incidents identified by The Post targeted players and fans of color, or teams fielded by schools with large minority populations. More than half focused on Hispanics.

In one of the earliest examples, students at a Wisconsin high school soccer game in April 2016 chanted “Trump, build a wall!” at black and Hispanic players. A few months later, students at a high school basketball game in Missouri turned their backs and hoisted a Trump/Pence campaign sign as the majority-black opposing team walked onto the court. In 2017, two high school girls in Alabama showed up at a football game pep rally with a sign reading “Put the Panic back in Hispanic” and a “Trump Make America Great Again” banner. In late 2017, two radio hosts announcing a high school basketball game in Iowa were caught on a hot mic describing Hispanic players as “español people.” “As Trump would say,” one broadcaster suggested, “go back where they came from.” Both announcers were fired. After the volleyball incident in Kansas, though, the fallout was more muted. The opposing school district, Baldwin City, commissioned an investigation and subsequently asserted that there was “no evidence” of racist jeers. Administrators from Piper’s school system dismissed that claim and countered with a statement supporting their students. An hour after the game, Jordyn fought to keep her eyes dry as she boarded the team bus home. When white players insisted that everything would be okay, she slipped in ear buds and selected “my mood playlist,” a collection of somber nighttime songs. She wiped her cheeks. Jordyn had long ago concluded that Trump didn’t want her — or “anyone who is just not white” — in the United States. But hearing other students shout it was different. Days later, her English teacher assigned an essay asking about “what’s right and what’s wrong.” At first, Jordyn thought she might write about the challenges transgender people face. Then she had another idea. “The students were making fun of us because we were different, like our hair and skin tone,” Jordyn wrote. “How are you gonna be mad at me and my friends for being black. . . . I love myself and so should all of you.” She read it aloud to the class. She finished, then looked up. Everyone began to applaud.

It's not just young Trump supporters who torment classmates because of who they are or what they believe. As one boy in North Carolina has come to understand, kids who oppose the president — kids like him — can be just as vicious. By Gavin Trump’s estimation, nearly everyone at his middle school in Chapel Hill comes from a Democratic family. So when the kids insist on calling him by his last name — even after he demands that they stop — the 13-year-old knows they want to provoke him, by trying to link the boy to the president they despise. In fifth grade, classmates would ask if he was related to the president, knowing he wasn’t. They would insinuate that Gavin agreed with the president on immigration and other polarizing issues. “They saw my last name as Trump, and we all hate Trump, so it was like, ‘We all hate you,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘Why are you teasing me? I have no relationship to Trump at all. We just ended up with the same last name.’ ” Beyond kids like Gavin, the Post analysis also identified dozens of children across the country who were bullied, or even assaulted, because of their allegiance to the president. School staff members in at least 18 states, from Washington to West Virginia, have picked on students for wearing Trump gear or voicing support for him. Among teenagers, the confrontations have at times turned physical. A high school student in Northern California said that after she celebrated the 2016 election results on social media, a classmate accused her of hating Mexicans and attacked her, leaving the girl with a bloodied nose. Last February, a teenager at an Oklahoma high school was caught on video ripping a Trump sign out of a student’s hands and knocking a red MAGA cap off his head. And in the nation’s capital — where only 4 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2016 — an outspoken conservative teenager said she had to leave her prestigious public school because she felt threatened. In a YouTube video, Jayne Zirkle, a high school senior, said that the trouble started when classmates at the School Without Walls discovered an online photo of her campaigning for Trump. She said students circulated the photo, harassed her online and called her a white supremacist. A D.C. school system official said they investigated the allegations and allowed Jayne to study from home to ensure she felt safe. “A lot of people who I thought were my best friends just all of a sudden totally turned their backs on me,” Jayne said. “People wouldn’t even look at me or talk to me.” For Gavin, the teasing began in fourth grade, soon after Trump announced his candidacy. After more than a year of schoolyard taunts, Gavin decided to go by his mother’s last name, Mather, when he started middle school. The teenager has been proactive, requesting that teachers call him by the new name, but it gets trickier, and more stressful, when substitutes fill in. He didn’t legally change his last name, so “Trump” still appears on the roster. The teasing has subsided, but the switch wasn’t easy. Gavin likes his real last name and feared that changing it would hurt his father’s feelings. His dad understood, but for Gavin, the guilt remains. “This is my name,” he said. “And I am abandoning my name.”

Maritza Avalos knows what's coming. It's 2020. The next presidential election is nine months away. She remembers what happened during the last one, when she was just 11. “Pack your bags,” kids told her. “You get a free trip to Mexico.” She’s now a freshman at Kamiakin High, the same Washington state school where her older sister, Cielo, confronted the teenagers who chanted “Build the wall” at a football game in late 2018. Maritza, 14, assumes the taunts that accompanied Trump’s last campaign will intensify with this one, too. “I try not to think about it,” she said, but for educators nationwide, the ongoing threat of politically charged harassment has been impossible to ignore. In response, schools have canceled mock elections, banned political gear, trained teachers, increased security, formed student-led mediation groups and created committees to develop anti-discrimination policies.

In California, the staff at Riverside Polytechnic High School has been preparing for this year’s presidential election since the day after the last one. On Nov. 9, 2016, counselors held a workshop in the library for students to share their feelings. Trump supporters feared they would be singled out for their beliefs, while girls who had heard the president brag about sexually assaulting women worried that boys would be emboldened to do the same to them. “We treated it almost like a crisis,” said Yuri Nava, a counselor who has since helped expand a student club devoted to improving the school’s culture and climate. Riverside, which is 60 percent Hispanic, also offers three courses — African American, Chicano and ethnic studies — meant to help students better understand one another, Nava said. And instead of punishing students when they use race or politics to bully, counselors first try to bring them together with their victims to talk through what happened. Often, they leave as friends.

In Gambrills, Md., Arundel High School has taken a similar approach. Even before a student was caught scribbling the n-word in his notebook in early 2017, Gina Davenport, the principal, worried about the effect of the election’s rhetoric. At the school, where about half of the 2,200 students are minorities, she heard their concerns every day. But the racist slur, discovered the same month as Trump’s inauguration, led to a concrete response. A “Global Community Citizenship” class, now mandatory for all freshmen in the district, pushes students to explore their differences. A recent lesson delved into Trump’s use of Twitter. “The focus wasn’t Donald Trump, the focus was listening: How do we convey our ideas in order for someone to listen?” Davenport said. “We teach that we can disagree with each other without walking away being enemies — which we don’t see play out in the press, or in today’s political debates.”

Since the class debuted in fall 2017, disciplinary referrals for disruption and disrespect have decreased by 25 percent each school year, Davenport said. Membership in the school’s speech and debate team has doubled. The course has eased Davenport’s anxiety heading into the next election. She doesn’t expect an uptick in racist bullying. “Civil conversation,” she said. “The kids know what that means now.” Many schools haven’t made such progress, and on those campuses, students are bracing for more abuse. Maritza’s sister, Cielo, told her to stand up for herself if classmates use Trump’s words to harass her, but Maritza is quieter than her sibling. The freshman doesn’t like confrontation. She knows, though, that eventually someone will say something — about the wall, maybe, or about how kids who look like her don’t belong in this country — and when that day comes, the girl hopes that she’ll be strong.

[anarchistettin]

back when the flag was just being instituted and people opted to use the alphabet instead of a communal signifier

my worry was that our desperate attempts to make a community & culture would be undermined, by predatory ideologues (who aren’t queer in the slightest). Literally the very instant the flag got hung up over the bookstores, folks (mostly conservative gays (there’s a shitload of them - did you know? amazingly white group, there, too, fsr)) began hyper-defining all the colors, whittling down the language into labels & specific castes of “formally gay though”, and swapping out genuine issues for bullshit assimilation into white supremacist culture (marriage and military, specifically). “Gold star” came into the lexicon. It has been normalized ever since to hate bi people and mock enby people (back then we weren’t enbies, it was just “queer” and an animal-crackers grab bag, you’ll have to ask me about that some other time, when I’m less pissed off).

good thing I was just being negative and haughty, right?

because of my age, the various rainbows & gradient palettes always look like badges to me, and they say “we will not be even slightly kind; you are not welcome”. Older folks tried (briefly) to say “no, no; don’t underestimate the kids” but they were wrong. Admirable and warm, but gravely mistaken.

Just being the alt-alphabet team of shitty ideologues is bad enough - using your energies to promote white supremacist regimes, to bash people you wish to exclude from your color-band & Official Label, to demand that others not only forgive but support your chosen predatory ruler/celebrity on the ridiculous belief that usa electoral politics have genuine practical importance in the world of today? it’s unforgivable.

If you engage in labelling, if you value a dipshit ugly-ass sports-looking fucking bullshit flag over a single person, if you demand that people support you in electoral politics or stop criticizing your favorite democrat? you’re worse than the incels or the nazis. They are mindless hazards. You are an educated and armed enemy hiding in plain sight. Traitors do more damage than witless foes. 

If you’re flag waving and calling for votes, you’re just a typical fucking USA nazi piece of shit. Whatever nuance you think can be tricked out there Does Not Matter.

y’all say assuaging things like “we have elders” and celebrate them when they’re photogenic, but look:

just don’t anymore. Don’t come around us with your questions and your fakery and your empty flattery. Take off the uniforms, give up terrorizing queer people, shut the fuck up about what you believe and start talking about what you think you might be good for. Then you can learn things from elder Queers. Then you can start expressing beliefs. After you’ve done something.

I mean something good - I don’t mean any of the incredibly bad stuff you’ve done. For instance what you (privileged young and proud Alphabet Army members) did to nonwhite trans communities at the beginning of the millennium? will never be forgot by me. You haven’t reached the step of admitting what you’ve done, so there’s freakish little chance of you ever being forgivable over it. You do exactly what the out-nazis do: appropriate and pervert language symbols. It accomplishes the same goal: it wipes out small and undefended communities of people that the mainstream hates. You are an important mechanism in the hate-engine of today. You made us less strong and less safe.

You could’ve asked questions. THEN sat there fucking listening to the answers, and THEN thinking about them, all while not expressing authoritarianism and bigotry. You chose the other. Just like very nearly every other privileged person in this land has done. The shame mounts every day - you won’t face it, and you can’t seem to stop. You’re hooked.

[stars--n--stripes-blog]

Like any religion, wokeness understands the need to convert children. The old Jesuit motto (sometimes attributed to Voltaire) was, after all, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.” And so I was moved but not particularly surprised by George Packer’s tale of a progressive school banishing separate restrooms for boys and girls because this reinforces the gender binary. The school did not inform parents of this, of course:

Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking.

As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy.” QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness,” or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Last week, I defended drag queens reading stories to kids in libraries. I don’t take back my words. Getting children interested in reading with costumed clowns strikes me as harmless. But when I was directed to the website of Drag Queen Story Hours, I found the following:

[DQSH] captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

However well-meant, this is indoctrination into an ideology, not campy encouragement for reading and fun.

And then there is the disturbing “social justice” response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.

By Andrew Sullivan

[wetwareproblem]

@diagnosis-prognosis-psychosis​ Frankly this is taking up way too much real estate on my blog so... this is what you get.

I was drafting an extremely lengthy point-by-point response to this, explaining all of the many, many, many, many things you misunderstand about every religion other than your particular flavour of Xianity, and Judaism in particular. I sunk probably an hour into it.

Then I got to your point 4.

4. You’re right, I am. My faith demands that I find a model of Judaism that fits Christian teachings, and that model is the model that Christ and his apostles preached. That is what my faith considers the true model of Judaism - a model wherein evangelism was only prohibited by the first covenant due to the circumstances of Israel at the time.

That’s... that’s a show-stopper on the religious-education front.

You are never going to find that model, because it doesn’t exist. There is no “version of Judaism” preached by the followers of Oily Josh, because that religion is Xianity. Judaism is, in fact, its own distinct entity with its own distinct history. A history that includes over a millenium of Xian evangelists being the first step toward murdering us.

So yeah. We take a dim view of evangelism.

I’m done talking religion with you; you are just too completely, willfully ignorant to even make sense of it anyway.

That leaves us with the rather disturbing politics you’ve been fed.

9a. You don’t seem to be taking the cute snarky hints, so let me be explicit: The things you are saying? Are made up by racists.

Kid, I have lived over twice as long as you. This means, among other things, I’ve got way more life experience than you. Don’t give me that “if you lived in a small town you’d know” bullshit. I have lived in many places in my time, from cities of millions to a community that still numbers less than 100 people total.

The divide you’re painting does not exist. There are urban communities (and let me come out and say outright what you keep dancing around: communities of coolour) that are tight-knit and vibrant. There are rural “communities” in name only, stretches of road where you might see your neighbours once every couple of months and never know their names.

You have been fed a racist myth, kid. I’m sorry.

9b. [citation needed]

9c. You’re about ten seconds from launching into a diatribe, I can tell. But... riddle me this: 

You claim government is evil.

You claim government is beholden to corporations.

You claim corporations are not evil.

How are corporations not responsible for what their minions do?

9d. No. No it is not. You see, unlike you, I lived through the 90s. I personally witnessed the way “urban” was used in that time. Remind me, when was he apprehended again?

You are talking racially-tinged politics whether you know it or not.

9e. “I never defended their actions, I just said they’re not a problem and we shouldn’t really do anything about them.” Now who’s playing semantics? What you are doing provides cover for their actions because - get this! - if we don’t do anything about them THEY ARE FREE TO FUCKING ACT.

Re the FBI stuff: See point 9b.

Kid, the alt-right literally marched under the slogan “Jews will not replace us” before murdering someone I would have been proud to call a comrade. They routinely talk about how they want to kill us all off, threaten us, beat us, and shoot up synagogues.

So yes. The alt-right do, in fact, see me as Them. They see me as a traitor and collaborator, and they have shown that at least some of them are ready to kill over it.

Have you ever heard your sources talking about ZOG? (If not, please remember this when it happens. Because it will happen.) What that refers to is the “zionist-occupied government,” a common belief in alt-right circles that Jews have infiltrated the government and are the reason it is bad. They will never ally with me against the evil government, because they think I’m the reason the government is evil.

“Is one point of difference enough to condemn your greatest ally against-” When that “one point of difference” is whether I and people like me should be alive or not, then yes, that is enough to condemn anybody who differs from me on that point as an enemy and a would-be murderer.

The rest of that paragraph is racist bullshit that somebody fed you because if you thought that Black people were the cause of everything bad you wouldn’t notice while they picked your pockets. I’m sorry this happened to you, but now you have an opportunity to do better - to show righteousness.\

I will not engage further with racist diatribes, and they will not get reblogged here because there’s no way I’m giving them a wider audience.

10a. So... where are all of the people shooting up white churches in the name of nonwhite people? Have you got a list of 100 people murdered by antifa? ‘Cause... I was able to find that kind of evidence of a problem on the alt-right side in like 30 seconds tops, and frankly I know it’s being awfully conservative with that body count.

One side in this debate has a list of murderers and gunmen who were specifically motivated by common ideology. The other does not.

Why are you pretending these are equal? Why is it important to you to see “murderers” and “not murderers” as the same?

I don’t care about political registration. That’s one of those clever distortions fed to you by people who want to feed you a story. What I care about is actual motivation, as demonstrated in statements preceding these incidents, documents left by the people, the people themselves when they’re around after the fact, things they said and did while attacking people, etc.

You know, the things that show what their reason for resorting to violence was.

That strikes me as a little more important than a piece of paperwork that they had to fill out once upon a time because your political system is deeply weird.

🚩: Saying that having the “wrong” hormone levels for your gender is bad is something that will always splash on trans people, who literally always naturally have the “wrong” hormone levels for our gender. So yeah. Transphobic. Saying that abnormal hormone levels mean you are irrational and should not be listened to is wildly transphobic.

🚩: See the bolded line in point 9e.

11. I don’t care what your original motivation was for repeating right wing myths. I care that:

You’re repeating right-wing myths as facts, and You are doing so specifically to cover up for the actions of Nazis. Oh, and also: In doing so, you are playing into very old antisemitic conspiracy theories. Eventually, the people you’re listening to are going to use your belief in this myth to convince you that actually Jews are just oppressing ourselves.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous when I put it that way. But there is a direct path from A to B that these people use all the time. I’d lay it out here but frankly I’m not sure you won’t believe it because you are in just that vulnerable and ignorant a position.

I desperately hope you find more honest and less manipulative sources before it’s too late. But... I’ve seen enough kids like you that I’m very, very worried you won’t. Hell, TBH I’m not sure it’s not too late already.

This is an important lesson: It doesn’t matter whether you intended to say bigoted things or not. You did say bigoted things, and now you need to own that. You screwed up; fix the mistake.

You have a model of what you think about Jews, but... I’m afraid that model has some holes in it.

If you don’t think less of us, why do you think that we - people who live and breathe Judaism every single day - know less about it than you, an outsider who literally only knows what other outsiders have told you? Do you think we’re that ignorant of our own history, customs, and culture? Or do you think that you’re just naturally that much more knowledgeable than everybody about everything?

You might not hate us. But you’re spreading falsehoods that have a very ugly and violent history, and that put us in danger. If you don’t hate us, if you don’t want us endangered, that should concern you.

Your perspective is coloured by your faith - and that faith, unfortunately, is stained with a history and undercurrent of bigotry and harm toward Jews. That’s not saying it’s irreparable, but you have to understand that that context is there and it shapes interactions between our cultures. Some of the remnants of that historical bigotry are still there. Some of the less obvious forms of it are still routinely practiced. I don’t expect you to know and recognize all of this - how could you? It doesn’t affect you, after all! - but please, please show us enough kindness to listen when we talk about how it affects us.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Race, Brand and the Placebo Effect

by Dan H

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Dan rambles on the vague theme of Racefail~

This is an article about race, but it's going to start off being an article about shampoo.

I have, on occasion, had trouble with dandruff, and as a result have needed to purchase shampoo to deal with this affliction. In my second year of university, I ran out of shampoo, so I went to the local Co-Op and picked up a bottle of Head and Shoulders.

It wasn't until I was on my way back home with my purchase that I realised that the only reason I had chosen that particular brand was that I had been seeing advertisements for Head and Shoulders for as long as I can remember, so that in my mind “anti-dandruff shampoo” was linked with the Head and Shoulders brand on a fundamental and inextricable level.

This was something of an epiphany for me, because it finally made me realise that advertising does not work the way I thought it did. I had assumed, and I think most people assume on some level, that advertisements worked my making you see the advertisement and immediately want the thing advertised. Some adverts do (particularly ads for food or drink if I see them when I'm hungry or thirsty) but that's usually secondary to their main function, which is to get into your head on a subconscious level and make you associate a particular need (anti-dandruff shampoo, a cool refreshing drink, a boost to your fragile self-esteem) with a particular product in a positive way, so that your choices and actions are influenced without your even knowing it.

And it works. If I am generically thirsty and not making a conscious effort to drink more fruit juice, or actively wanting a particular type of drink, I'll buy a coke.

What's even more interesting about this phenomenon is that it works even if you are aware of it. I know that a big part of the reason I drink coke, eat fast food, and shop in Sainsburys is that I've been influenced by advertising, but I carry on doing them anyway because most of the time people don't make informed decisions about things, we just go with our first instincts and our irrational impulses, even if we know they're wrong.

The same concept shows up in all kinds of places. It shows up in the pharmaceuticals industry, people find shiny red pills in bold, brand-name packaging to be more effective than nondescript white pills in generic grey packaging. We respond instinctively to visual cues, and we don't know we're doing it.

I bring all this up, because one of the many semi-irreconcilable controversies that came up during the whole Racefail debate is the dichotomy of race-as-physical-appearance versus race-as-cultural-identity. Heck, the whole thing basically started as a direct result of Elizabeth Bear saying you should write non-white people the same way you wrote white people, and some other people respectfully disagreeing.

Essentially there's two problems. The first is that most characters – particularly most protagonists – in genre fiction tend to be white (and tend to be men). The second problem is that most invented cultures in genre fiction tend to be based on either medieval Europe, modern America or horrendous stereotypes of non-European cultures.

The argument can be made that the latter problem simply can't be addressed by white American or European authors. Hell, it could be argued that it can't be addressed by non-white American or European authors. Nobody can ever really shake off the preconceptions of the culture they were raised in, and you can never really understand a culture that isn't your own. You can know stuff about it, but no matter how much anime you watch you can never know what it's like to be Japanese.

The first problem, however, can be addressed by white, American or European writers, and should be. Again the argument could be made that, particularly if you're working in a created world, race is kind of an arbitrary choice and so is ultimately meaningless. This argument is half-right. In a created world, race is purely cosmetic, but it's cosmetic in the same way that the colour of a headache pill is cosmetic. It's the sort of cosmetic that gets in your head and changes the way you think.

It all comes down to the nature of racism (or, for that matter, of prejudice in general). Prejudice is a lot like advertising: people think that it's all about big, obvious things. You see an ad for coke, so you go out and buy a glass of coke, a black man applies for a job, but he doesn't get it because the guy who interviews him is a big fat racist who hates black people.

I'm going to go off on another tangent here and talk about

Captain Planet

.

Captain Planet

was a well meaning kids cartoon that took an endearingly multiracial gang of kids and had them fight villains who represented various ecological issues through the power of Earth, Fire, Wind, Water and Heart, which together allowed them to summon Captain Planet, who would lay the smackdown on evil villains who wanted to wreck the environment for no clear reason.

My mother really didn't like it.

She didn't like it because she thought it was dangerous to present the idea that problems for which we are all responsible (like pollution) are caused by single “villains”. I kind of think she was right.

I get that you can use a villain to personify something that is “part of all of us” (man) but I think it's actually hard to pull off in practice. Most of the time, personifying a social problem as an unambiguously horrible villain just sends the message that there are “bad people” out there who are polluters, racists, or whatever. This is why Whedon's cardboard misogynists piss me off, this is why the pseudo-Nazism of the Death Eaters was so annoying to me. Pollution doesn't happen because some guy in a cape decided to tip toxic waste into the sea for fun, it happens because guys like me can't be arsed to turn out heating down in the early summer.

The same kind of goes for racism. We all like to think that racism exists because of other people, that somehow there's some kind of rogue group of twenty or thirty hardcore racists out there who are between them responsible for all race issues everywhere, from the lack of Chinese characters in Firefly to the lack of decent Kosher butchers in Oxford. In fact racism exists because racist attitudes are pernicious, self-perpetuating, and all-pervasive.

There's a lot wrong with the Avenue Q song Everyone's A Little Bit Racist (it frequently sounds like it's using that statement to excuse racism rather than examine it - “ethnic jokes are so uncouth, but we laugh because they're based on truth” umm, no they're not, guys). It is, however, an important statement of fact. The reason that a white person is more likely to be hired for any given job than a nonwhite person is not because the person giving them the job is a cartoon racist, sitting there saying “no, I will not hire a filthy mudblood” it's because the person giving them the job is affected by racism on a level so fundamental they don't realise they're doing it. Just like you pass over the store-brand coke for the one in the red-and-white can you have been taught your whole life to associate with a cool refreshing beverage, so you pass over the guy (or woman) who doesn't look how you have been taught your whole life to expect a lawyer/teacher/investment banker/data entry clerk to look.

The really scary thing is that I catch myself doing it. I do, in fact, pay less attention to the opinions of my non-white and female friends. Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation. It's weird as fuck when you catch yourself doing it, just like when you catch yourself unconsciously reaching for a can of coke instead of a bottle of lemonade, or buy Head and Shoulders instead of a cheaper or more effective shampoo.

It all comes back to branding.

Now okay, you can make the argument here that I'm just passing the buck, and to a degree I am. Ultimately my attitudes, my purchasing habits and my behaviour are my responsibility, but they are influenced by the surroundings I grew up with. There isn't a causal link, I don't listen to my female friends talking and think “gosh, I remember this one TV show I saw had a woman on it who didn't know what she was talking about, therefore I won't listen to this person” nor do I think “well Willow knew what she was talking about, so this person must too”. I just have instinctive responses to things which are coloured by the society in which I was raised.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid. Of course first you need to get over the fact that it would then be a book about a black kid who gets rescued from his abusive black family by a kindly white guy, but if we assume that Harry was black and the Potter books weren't written in such a way that “Muggle” was effectively a racial slur. You would then have a situation in which the single most recognised fictional character in the world was a black kid (not only a black kid, but a black British kid). It would be huge, just like it was huge the first time they let an actual black guy play Othello. It wouldn't matter in the slightest that Harry Potter didn't listen to hip-hop or talk about Malcom X or use “urban” slang or do whatever else it is that white people seem to think black people have to do in fiction to properly represent “black culture”. The simple fact of the most popular fictional character in the world having black skin would have been huge. It would have changed the way a generation of children thought about race, and it would have changed it for the better. It wouldn't have been a miracle, it wouldn't have abolished racism overnight, but it would have done more good than any three government initiatives you might care to name.

Of course, if Harry Potter had been black, the book might not have sold at all, but that's a whole different problem.

Themes:

Topical

,

Minority Warrior

~

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 23:19 on 2009-03-31This is really interesting, Dan! The comparison between unconscious racism and branding makes a scary amount of sense. (And you are right about the "Potter" books, as well.)

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it? A friend and I were discussing this when racefail happened - the link is here, if you're interested.

http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/40140.html

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http://viorica8957.livejournal.com/

at 00:31 on 2009-04-01(I keep getting an error message when I try to log in, so I'm using OpenID)

It's a pervasive problem, and one that is worsened by the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge it. I was arguing with my mother about racism recently, and the argument she kept falling back on was "But don't you see how much has changed since the sixties? There's a black president! There's no segregation! Things are so much better!" It's a defense people use to ignore their own buried racism- "

I'm

not a Nazi/KKK member/skinhead, so clearly

I

can't be racist."

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Sonia Mitchell

at 03:20 on 2009-04-01

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Anyway, interesting article. Whenever I'm staying for any length of time with advert game co-players (guess the advert on tv before the product is named) I find myself much more aware of how many don't mention the product until right at the end. Building up the atmosphere/message first and then linking it to the product, cementing it in people's minds on a less conscious level after a few repeated viewings, seems to be the way a lot of things are done.

Which, as you say, is exactly what makes these attitudes harder to spot - they don't come ready labelled.

Mary-j-59 - that was an interesting read, thanks.

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Guy

at 05:30 on 2009-04-01I think a really interesting example in relation to this question is the original series of Star Trek. For anyone who isn't a total nerd and therefore doesn't know this already, part of Gene Roddenberry's idea for Star Trek was that in the far future, all of our silly, parochial attitudes about race and gender and nationality and so on will have been resolved and looked on much like we look on witch-burnings or the crusades or whatever; we will have gotten over it and it'll just be a bit of ugly but quaint ancient history. And on this basis, he wanted to have a multi-ethnic crew, with men and women in equal positions, and, most importantly, for them *not to make a big deal out of it*, with "episode of the week on gender equality" stuff happening.

Of course, for any of us who watch an episode of Star Trek now, this is a pretty laughable conception of what's going on, because the most important person on the ship is Captain Kirk, a white American male, who is pretty much defined by his adherence to an ideal of American masculinity which is very much "of its time". Meanwhile, he's surrounded by a crew of other white men who are primarily distinguished by their funny accents... and Uhura, who essentially is a telephone operator wearing a very, very short skirt. So from the point of view of making a judgement about whether or not this represents a successful embodiment of Roddenberry's vision, we would stamp "FAIL" all over it in big red letters.

However, I remember seeing a documentary a while ago (possibly "Trekkies"? Anyway...) which mentioned that Uhura was the first black woman on television (either in a regular part or at all, I can't remember) and various well-known contemporary black women talking about how exciting and how important it was for them to see a black woman with a speaking part on TV. By contemporary standards the part seems incredibly sexist and virtually definitive of the whole "token black character" phenomenon, but compared with the standards of the other things on TV at the time, it was very progressive.

So I guess what I'm saying is, people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

In terms of fantasy fiction, I think the clear beacon showing how the representation of people of other "races" (I have to put the scare quotes because I'm one of those who believes the term "race" is not a good descriptor of anything) can and should be done is Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series. Ged is not just a "white character with dark skin", but nor is the culture he comes from depicted as some horrible stereotype of an existing earth culture. It may be the case that in 50 years time people will look back on Earthsea and find it just as gauche as we find Star Trek now, but for the moment I would say it is the gold standard. It's also rather unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be much else around that is even trying to achieve that standard, but... "90% of everything is crap", as they say, and with genre fiction that is probably, sadly, an understatement.

Lastly (I hope that I don't break ferretbrain with such a long comment!) on the "everyone's a bit racist" question, I think there is a grain of truth in that statement but taken at face value I would disagree with it. I think... in my own case, I grew up in a suburb of Sydney where I never saw a black person at all, on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the only black person I knew was my grandfather (who is/was an Australian Aboriginal - but the genes are "dilute" enough in my case that I look absolutely white) who I did not see often. And so as a consequence I think I had all kinds of unconscious ideas about "other races" that I didn't really think about... I guess I didn't have any real sources of information beyond books and TV and lectures at my very left-wing school that took the form of "Don't be racist! For real!" (which were well-intentioned but I think were in their form a bit stupid, rather in the way that Captain Planet is a bit stupid).

Anyway, when the family moved to England we moved to a suburb (and I went to a school) where there were a lot more non-white people around, and I discovered that... a lot of my ideas had been really dumb, as well as being rather unformed. And in some sense, if you were to spell out those ideas in words, you would probably conclude that they were indeed racist ideas and that therefore I was "racist", despite all my intentions to the contrary.

But... I also think that it was that exposure to the actual people that broke down and changed those dumb ideas. And it remains my conviction that all the well-intentioned talk (or even, clever and subtle argumentation and explanation) in the world is no substitute for encounters with real people for breaking down prejudices based on ignorance. I suppose, to go back to your Shampoo analogy, it's kind of like this: the world may be full of explicit, overt messages telling you to buy a certain shampoo, and those overt messages may be supported by hidden and hard-to-unearth ideologies (bright packaging indicates a superior product to those in bland packaging!) but once you actually put the shampoo in your hair, it either works or it doesn't. (There may of course be an effect whereby those social messages cause you to undermine or misunderstand your own experiences, but this post is already waaaay too long...)

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Gina Dhawa

at 07:46 on 2009-04-01@Guy regarding Star Trek - I entirely agree. There is a lot of fail with regard to the depictions of race in TOS, but as a product of its time, I give it a lot of credit. And about the gender imbalance, it's very interesting that he was specifically told to drop the female second in command from the pilot episode if he was ever to get the series on air.

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a

awareness

goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

In the case of culture, it isn't a case of understanding truly everything about a culture that isn't your own, it's about respecting that culture and not treating like the exotic other. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, but hell, if I wasn't to write about a culture other than mine then I have no idea

what

I'd ever write.

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I will bristle at that, thanks.

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Arthur B

at 08:27 on 2009-04-01

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it?

I suspect a lot of this boils down to people using particular ideas or tropes developed by the grand old racist authors of the past without really thinking about where the tropes from and why they are doing it; all they know is "this is the sort of thing that happens in the SF/fantasy stories I like, so they're going to happpen in the stories I write."

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way: you simply have to skip the ones which are just blatantly horrible, and treat the others as an inversion of colonialism, in which the simple beliefs of a "primitive" outsider prove to be more powerful and enduring than the hypocrisies of so-called "civilised" people.

There is nothing in this scenario which

requires

that the outsider be a white man from an analogue of Northern Europe, or the corrupt civilisations he encounters have to be Mediterranean/Middle Eastern city-states. But hundreds of Howard imitators, and even more folk who have been unconsciously influenced by his stories, make that assumption every time they use the idea. And that's racist.

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Andy G

at 10:18 on 2009-04-01"For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way"

I wondered about this recently when I was reading H.P. Lovecraft - whether we really can "read in a non-racist way" - as Dan says, it's not a matter of racist individuals, but of pervasive racist attitudes in society as a whole. Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds? Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

I think you're spot on though about modern authors not reflecting on the dubious assumptions they take from older authors. I especially felt that about Olaf Stapledon.

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Andy G

at 10:37 on 2009-04-01Oh and there's also a great example

[here]

of the Captain Planet approach to complex world issues.

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Shim

at 10:58 on 2009-04-01

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

I suppose there's a bit of difference there, because if I wrote about aliens (or heck, even from an "alien perspective") there's little to no chance of aliens lambasting me in the Sunday papers about my ignorance and stereotyping. Also, because they're not real, there's no objective reality that my writing would fail to reflect. A lot of stories basically take White Middle-Class Anglo-Saxons and jiggle them a bit to make them vampires or wizards (sometimes, especially for wizards, these people are 'Celts' in an unspecified way that is hard to distinguish from WMCAS).

On the other hand, if I try to write about or from WMCAS female experiences, the fact that women actually exist means my writing can be objectively inaccurate. Same for, say, writing about Indian culture. So I think the fact that there is a whole deep, complex culture there that the writer doesn't understand is a real problem; while more understanding can mean they write more convincing stories, you can end up with the situation where people understand things just enough to make massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives.

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Rami

at 11:24 on 2009-04-01

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right.

Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is

♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫

because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas -- and if we admit that to ourselves and make a conscious effort, things could be a lot better. Lots of people mistakenly

equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions

(warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way

I was thinking vaguely along these lines recently as well, when I picked up

Triplanetary

, and had to put it down after only a few pages because it was so full of the unconscious attitudes of the 30s and 40s. It may be a classic of science-fiction and have inspired half of the current generation of SF writers and editors, but the racism and sexism were a bit too much for me. It distresses me that, as Arthur points out, lots of modern writers have doubtless picked up a few of the tropes because they "really liked it in the Lensman series" and completely obliviously dropped them, scheming dark-skinned villains and helpless blonde damsels included, into their own work.

think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

Absolutely!

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Rami

at 11:28 on 2009-04-01

massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives

IIRC, that kind of thing was at the root of the whole RaceFail imbroglio -- when people did exactly that, but refused to admit it.

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Arthur B

at 11:34 on 2009-04-01

Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds?

We'd better learn to, otherwise that's everything from before 1950 down the memory hole...

Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene in

The Book of the Short Sun

.

Secondly, if the stories have any merit at all there's going to be something more to them than just bigotry. Yes, Lovecraft used the fear of the outsider a hell of a lot. But the fun thing about that particular fear is that it's always going to be with us, and HPL had a clever knack of turning the fear of the outsider into the fear of the outside itself. When Lovecraft was writing about how threatening he found immigrants (

The Horror At Red Hook

) he was being horrid; when he was writing about how the entire universe beyond this placid island we call Earth is a cold uncaring void that is completely hostile to any life that even resembles us (

The Colour Out of Space

) he was being visionary. It's not always easy to divorce the cultural xenophobia from the cosmic vertigo - they're written by the same man, they have the same experiences and agendas shaping them - but I'd submit that it is possible.

Thirdly, there's plenty of Lovecraft and Howard where racism just isn't a factor, or is only a factor if you try hard to look for it.

The Tower of the Elephant

and

At the Mountains of Madness

spring to mind.

I honestly don't think that reading Lovecraft or Howard is necessarily going to feed anyone's inner racist unless they actually

want

to be influenced that way ("Oh man, I totally agree with that but I could never say it in public..."). It helps that they lived in a time when many people simply didn't know better; it doesn't excuse them, but it does mean that both the attitude of the society they came from and their own personal quirks are well-known and out there for all to see. As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

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Rami

at 12:00 on 2009-04-01

You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene

Depends how much you disagree with them, I guess, and how evident that is in the text. I agree you can't dismiss an author entirely because of their attitudes, since as you say there's got to be something other than bigotry -- but if the bigotry is omnipresent it does get pretty difficult. Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face. On the other hand, he's only peripherally bigoted (xenophobic, but in a more understandable way) in The Whisperer in Darkness, and that's much easier to appreciate for what it is...

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Dan H

at 13:18 on 2009-04-01

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Crap, sorry about that. It's probably deeply ironic that in an article entirely about the subconscious effects of prejudice on our everyday thoughts and actions, I managed to forget that using "went to Oxford" as a synonym for "knows what they're talking about" is, itself, kinda offensive.

Sorry folks.

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

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Dan H

at 13:39 on 2009-04-01

Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face.

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time." We're in a position where we can condemn racism without it actually harming us. There's a world of difference between reading an old work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be black people" and reading a work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be *me and my family*."

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is ♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫ because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas

Yeah, I can see that. It's just that a lot of the way the song presents itself is in the language of racist apologism. Remember that the very *next* line is "and we could all stop being so PC!". The more I've thought about the actual sketch, the more I've been bothered by the way it's presented - remember it basically starts with a minority character (Kate Monster) calling out a non-minority character for being racist, and the non-minority character using "well you're racist too!" as a defence (and in fact citing the "but minority rights groups are racist as well!" argument).

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

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Shim

at 14:16 on 2009-04-01

Lots of people mistakenly equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions (warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

Interesting linked article... overall I tended to agree with the arguments, but at times it gave me the feeling that they were interpreting things in the way that supported their expectations, i.e. seeing racist attitudes that

might

not be there. Given how complicated some of the topics were, and how much discussion of racial issues goes on, it's not surprising to me (for example) that people sometimes argued from several sides, or were less coherent on more personal, complicated questions. I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take. Oh, and I'd have liked some counter-examples of answers that were

not

seen as hiding racist attitudes.

Also, it could really do with proofreading. But enough digression, back to Dan's article!

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Arthur B

at 14:48 on 2009-04-01

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time."

For what it's worth, I don't actually enjoy

The Horror At Red Hook

; I was raising it (not very clearly) as an example of a story that I'd usually just skip because the motivations behind it are entirely too obvious and entirely too ugly.

At the Mountains of Madness

is nice in that the monsters don't resemble

any

identifiable people - not physically, and not culturally - so that's at the other end of the spectrum.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way. (It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".) The most important thing is to read with your eyes open, and to read diversely; I think an exclusive diet of Lovecraft, Howard, and the various descendants and imitators is vastly more unhealthy and likely to blind you to problematic elements in their stories than a more balanced reading range.

A tangent: it dismays me sometimes to see the amount of uncritical fanboyism that surrounds

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

, which granted is a decently-written story but it again has massively problematic undertones; any interpretation of it which doesn't at least acknowledge that part of the point Lovecraft was making was KILL THE HALF-BREEDS is wilfully blinding itself to a really major component of the story, and there's a distressing number of authors who keep reusing the Deep Ones without even considering that angle.

Granted, the angle that people imitate most frequently is the "Oh no, it turns out I am a Deep One too" revelation at the end of the story, but - like Lovecraft himself - nobody ever makes the leap to "wait, surely that means the Deep Ones can't be all bad".

Even people who admit that Lovecraft was a racist

do this. And nobody calls people on it or says "hey, you're just repeating Lovecraft's slurs against miscegenation", presumably because everyone's kidding themselves that the fish people are fish people and can't possibly be a metaphor for something else.

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Arthur B

at 15:06 on 2009-04-01

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

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Andy G

at 15:57 on 2009-04-01@ Arthur: I did enjoy Lovecraft for the kinds of reasons you said (otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading) - and felt that I could "pick and choose", appreciating and analysing without necessarily condoning. But equally, I was aware that some of the bits I now found uncomfortable I would never even have noticed a few years ago - because I only really imagined racism to be overt KKK-style hatred, as Dan terms it (and Lovecraft does occasionally go there) - and yet even back then I would have prided myself on being able to detach myself from condoning the "racist bits" of the stories, which I now realise are far more pervasive. That's why I hesitate a bit before saying I can definitely remain a detached, objective attitude without colluding in the questionable ideas and imagery. Even if we can distance ourselves from stories by regarding them as historical artefacts, I'm not sure that we can do that completely successfully while still enjoying them as stories.

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position?

Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:11 on 2009-04-01

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

Sorry, Dan, if my hackles got raised. It's one of my buttons.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way.

This. People have different levels of privilege (white, class, education, etc) and that's such a big deal with regard to how their mileage will vary at what they will personally be able to deal with in texts.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:19 on 2009-04-01That's not to say I condone racism or any other kind of bigotry in texts, just that I find it understandable that people who don't themselves necessarily hold bigoted views can find things to enjoy in texts that do.

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Arthur B

at 16:33 on 2009-04-01

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading?

It varies for me. I have, in fact, stopped reading Robert E. Howard stories because they were pure out-and-out bigotry. On the other hand, I read

The Horror at Red Hook

all the way through. When I do keep reading, it's normally for one of two reasons (or a mix of them):

- The story has something more to it than racism.

Red Hook

is awful for many reasons, one of them being that there really

isn't

anything more to it than the racism.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

is, in many respects, just as racist, but it also features other ideas which are sufficiently interesting - and have exerted a sufficient influence over the horror genre - that those ideas are both worth salvaging and engaging enough that reading the story doesn't

exclusively

evoke discomfort.

- The story is useful for understanding the author, and I'm interested enough in the author to want to understand them.

Red Hook

as a story is terrible, but as an insight into what Lovecraft was thinking during his brief and unhappy tenancy in New York it's valuable.

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Dan H

at 18:11 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

I see what you did there.

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Dan H

at 18:44 on 2009-04-01Also:

Just reading the article you linked to Rami.

It's kind of terrifying, isn't it.

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Shim

at 18:45 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Hmm... I reckon there were enough references to his tousled mop of hair, and looking pale, to make that problematic.

East Asian descent? Native American? Inuit? Totally possible.

(this leads me to something Dan mentioned once; racism discussions always leap on to Black/White dichotomies even though it's not the most obvious one for everyone. I'd argue in Britain that Chinese or South Asian ancestry is much more common, certainly in the north)

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Arthur B

at 18:49 on 2009-04-01look he's albino with really messy hair

you are racist against albinos you are

you want to kill them and turn them into

medicine

and that's wrong

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Shim

at 21:56 on 2009-04-01What a wasteful idea! Everyone knows that albinos are best used as ruthless assassins.

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Dan H

at 22:15 on 2009-04-01

I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take.

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

It's things like the fact that pretty much all of them disagreed with affirmative action (which I'll admit can't be taken as racist in itself - it's a specific government policy and there's probably several reasons to disagree with it) but that none of them actually felt that they could *say* they didn't agree with affirmative action.

One of the things I've noticed in my recent Rambling Thoughts About Prejudice is that there's a lot of things that people are willing to condemn utterly (or support wholeheartedly) in the general case, but not in the specific. "I have nothing against interracial marriage, but I'm a little bit worried about the children" or "I support affirmative action, but obviously you can't let a better qualified white guy lose out to a black guy if it's a job he actually wants."

Ironically the person that comes out best is the seventy year old woman who says straight up "I'm against interracial marriage, but if my daughter married a black guy I'd still support her."

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Shim

at 22:44 on 2009-04-01

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

Indeed. Sorry, I'm not clear enough... it was the way the arguments were presented that I found dodgy, rather than anything in the analysis of the examples given; it seemed like they might be generalising from "this person said this, and in context of everything else they said which I have only partially printed here, they seem racist, so I think it may be tactical" to "this kind of language is a tactic to cover racism". The usual extrapolation problem arises. That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I found the paper a bit rambling (ooh, diminutive) and sometimes incoherent - for example, as basically a scientist I'm used to things with statistics and explanations of the experiment, rather than launching into an argument peppered with examples. Also I think it mixed up the names in at least one place (Andy/Mickey)?

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah".

Back on the article... I remember the Captain Planet thing coming up in a PSE class about ethics, on the lines of whether there were actually specific Evil people. A surprising proportion of the class (upper sixth) were really set on this idea and did

not

respond well to questions like "so do you honestly believe that Pol Pot never did a single good thing?" or "exactly what characteristics distinguish between the Evil people and everyone else?".

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Dan H

at 23:17 on 2009-04-01The paper is a bit rambling, and does make a bunch of assumptions (you can't really go from "these white people said this" to "white people say this") but I think it highlights some interesting points. I thought the example with "there is a firm which is 97% white" was a really interesting one, because a lot of the arguments people made were basically "you can only say their hiring policy is racist if you have met their HR guy and you know that he, personally is a racist".

Which brings us neatly back to Captain Planet and the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil.

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Wardog

at 23:24 on 2009-04-01I'm not saying anything constructive here because I'm quite frankly *terrified* since it's such an incredibly complex issue. But I just wanted to mention that I found the article interesting and the comments equally so.

I was also really worried we were going to have our own small-scale racefail but I'm relieved we only had a highereductionfail instead.

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Rami

at 00:04 on 2009-04-02

That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I don't remember exactly where I was linked to this paper from, but the two studies mentioned in the paper (from which the interviewees were drawn) tried to measure prevalence of racist attitudes based on survey responses, and found very few sets of responses that appeared minimally prejudiced. I think it's because of this that the paper makes the assumption that the interview responses are evincing racist attitudes, even where the responses themselves could be seen as ambiguous.

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah"

I'd say it's because she was honest ;-)

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do; I think that, as you say, the problem with Captain Planet et al is that they encourage the belief that the little actions of every day (not turning off the lights properly, etc) are perfectly OK, and that the Badness is distilled into the Evil People and that they are the only ones to blame.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 03:50 on 2009-04-02The Tarzan books are a little horrifying- I was pretty young when I read them and completely believed that racism ended in the sixties, but even then I understood that something strange was up with all the beautiful blonde women (and beautiful, blond Tarzan, of course). Why the hell would any ape (except humans) think a blonde was attractive? Later on in the series the racism gets more overt but its still ridiculous when its just "look how pretty and superior we are!"

My mom used to laugh whenever I watched Captain Planet and said I was being brainwashed.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 03:53 on 2009-04-02Andy G.:

I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position? Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

I enjoyed Taming of the Shrew when I saw it performed twenty years ago in college. Then I watched it again within the last two years. It sickened me. When Katherina obeyed whatshisname, I booed, but only loud enough for my wife and maybe a nearby audience member could hear.

Unless the play is promoted/listed as one of the tragedies, I won't see it again.

Perhaps the harder question is: is it making an excuse for the racism rather than for the enjoyment of the read.

The language the theater used excuse the production of TotS was that it may *appear* offensive to the modern audience and that it was the norm for the time. But that's donkeyshit. Disney's Song of the South won't be 're-released on dvd/blueray for only a limited time' even though it was the norm for the time because it *is* offensive to the modern audience today.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 04:14 on 2009-04-02

It all comes back to branding.

But the people that do the branding are members of the dominant culture.

Though arguably, that has been changing especially within last couple of decades. Well, at least to some degree though not quite for the better. Fucking BET.

- F.Dillinger

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 20:01 on 2009-04-02

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

Honestly, thinking about it at all lead to overthinking, because although that song from Avenue Q gets quoted *all the time* in discussions of race, it doesn't really seem to be saying anything simple about race at all except in the title. It includes characters talking about actual racism that they experience (Gary Coleman "can't even get a taxi"), apologetics ("stop being so pc"/"ethnic jokes are based on truth") and some things that honestly sound like they know perfectly well they're defending racism: people make judgements about race not about "big things like who to buy a newspaper from, but little things like thinking Mexican busboys should learn to speak GODDAMN ENGLISH!"

In the end the song is kind of a big mess of things you've heard people say about racism, but without a clear pov. The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay, but there's other stuff in there too...and also racism is such a hot button word it's hard to imagine using it to be completely positive. Also yes completely about the way it starts off with the idea that a minority is being "racist" to ever focus on its own group without including the majority, the "reverse racism" claim. Blech.

And regarding the rest, yes--in some of the discussions about sci fi I remember somebody mentioning the mystery genre and that shows a real difference. Where sci fi and fantasy has in many ways stuck to their traditional white guy roots, I don't think any mystery fan would say that they really expect the detective in any series to be white or male. I'm not a huge reader of mysteries, but even knowing the genre a little it seems like creating detectives from different backgrounds has become totally common. I guess since the detective is always going to have certain standard qualities (smart, analytical, observant, insightful etc.) people are eager to branch out in other ways looking for how they are different and how their differences affect how they solve crimes.

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is. To us HP as an example, you couldn't really say what a Wizard was like personality-wise, but you could do that for a House Elf or a giant or a goblin or a centaur...

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Arthur B

at 20:57 on 2009-04-02

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is.

I think sometimes it is colonial, and sometimes it is an attempt to be pseudohistorical. People have this odd idea that in the medieval period nobody travelled at all, and while it's true that 90% of the population never travelled much under normal circumstances a) that's still kind of true today in many places, and b) even though that was the case, you never had a situation where you had the English people who lived exclusively in a place called England whose borders were always much the same as they are today, and neighbouring them the French people who lived in a place called France with borders much like today's, and so on. People moved around: rich folk travelled and became merchants and sometimes settled in cities where the money was, poor people went on pilgrimages and were drafted into their lord's militia when time came to go to war, and enormous numbers of people ended up becoming refugees from plague, famine, and war - and that's just in medieval Europe.

This is not to say that our cultures aren't more diverse today than they were back then. But they were significantly more nuanced and heterogeneous than the sort of fake-medieval societies that sub-Tolkien fantasy hacks crank out. Writing realistically diverse societies is

achingly difficult

, and many people just don't try. (Which is wrong of them.)

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Dan H

at 02:04 on 2009-04-03

The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay,

It's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with. Or rather, it's the way *in which* it's supposed to be okay. I'm okay with the idea that "it's okay" to have racist attitudes in the sense that everybody has them, and having racist attitudes doesn't make you a bad person, just somebody who needs to be a bit more aware of race issues. The song, though, seems to imply that racism is just plain acceptable.

This might be a bit overly-analytical, but the song basically involves a bunch of minorities complaining about racism, then being revealed to be hypocrites. There's a fine line between humour about racism, and humour that is just plain racist and I fear that EaLBR strays into the latter camp.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 02:35 on 2009-04-03

t's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with.

Sorry, I wasn't clear there--neither am I. I don't think that the clearest message being "everyone (including minorities) is racist and that's okay" is a particularly good thing.

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 17:52 on 2009-04-03re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

I thought the firm question was stupid, to be honest, if the only information they are given is that a firm is 97% white! Draw inferences!

I once worked for a small business that employed 5 people. It was 100% white. By the paper's logic, the owners were horrible racists. But the population size of the firm is too small to use statistics like that.

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

If a hospital's nurses are 97% female, does that mean the hospital is discriminating against male nurses? To figure that out, you need the percentage of male nurses in the area to compare with.

Now, I did do an internship at a ~170 person, publicly traded company and every single position of importance was filled with a white male, and that did seem suspicious.

If a firm is 97% white, all that statistic tells us is that is could be racist, not that it is racist no matter how obvious the author of the paper finds that conclusion. Similarly, even if the company has reached that magical percentage that means diversity, it doesn't mean the company /isn't/ racist.

My aunt works for a large "diverse" company, 600 employee, and she told me about a month ago how a group of white coworkers had hung voodoo dolls from their desk lamps (as in mimicking lynching) in response to a black coworker reporting on some previous misbehavior they had done (I don't really remember the details). The company had no real policy to deal with the situation and basically tried to sweep it under the rug.

I thought the paper was interesting in that it showed some examples as to how people have developed a method of speaking around an issue that is impossible to discuss in our society.

I also thought it was interesting that people who reported having friendships with someone who was part of a minority group were much less racist towards that group. Which would suggest to me that diversity in elementary schools is probably one of the most important things we could do to help promote understanding.

I thought his methodology was a little suspicious for what he was trying to achieve--an honest discussion of racial prejudices. A stranger asking you questions to your face on a sensitive topic (which he obviously have strong feelings for) is hardly likely to promote honesty and is probably a large factor in the nervousness and stuttering the subjects showed.

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Arthur B

at 18:11 on 2009-04-03

If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

Wait, what? I know it isn't very fair to blame individual game companies for an industry-wide bias, but wouldn't it be completely fair to criticise them if they made no effort to address that bias?

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Dan H

at 19:31 on 2009-04-03

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

I think you're actually making a classic mistake here, which is to make the focus of a discussion about prejudice the question of whether or not specific *people* are prejudiced instead of whether prejudice is at work in a given situation.

If a games development company is 95% male, whether they have 20 employees or 200 there's something wrong. Is it partly the fault of the industry? Probably, but not entirely. Roughly one in six

World of Warcraft

players are female, the proportion of women in your hypothetical company is one third that size.

There is, actually a serious issue here. An interesting statistic is that when people are asked to judge what a "balanced" gender mix looks like, they tend to settle on a male:female ratio of about 2:1 with anything more than that being perceived as unfairly biased towards women. Even

Buffy

follows this pattern, with the core cast of the first series being two girls (Buffy, Willow) and three guys (Giles, Xander, Angel) for a 60-40 split in one of the most female dominated shows on mainstream TV.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance. You actually

can

take the fact that only 5% of a company's employees are women as evidence of sexism. Evidence isn't the same as proof, but if your first reaction to the suggestion that your hiring policy might be sexist is to go on the defensive, you're never going to make any progress.

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Shim

at 22:54 on 2009-04-03@Dan

agreed. I do think the response depends on exactly what question is asked (and due to editfail/vagueness of the article I'm not sure) and how the interviewees interpret it; someone might say that racism was definitely at play (in the industry as a whole, in the education system...) but not necessarily conclude that the company itself is definitely racist. But as you say, it would be a pretty good place to start.

Re: gender balance; a similar rule applies to time-per-student in the classroom. Teachers of either gender judge a "balanced" lesson as one that gives far more time to boys (cf. "Language Myths", Bauer & Trudgill - let nobody say I make airy claims). Observers, students etc. also follow this pattern. Giving equal time is a major problem for teachers even when made aware of it and leads to people claiming the lesson is dominated by girls.

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http://arkan2.livejournal.com/

at 22:30 on 2009-04-06Another excellent essay, and great discussion, too.

Yeah, it's scary what advertisements can do, without being able to influence people through “subliminal messages.” Ever seen

The Ad and the Ego

? Heavy stuff.

And then of course, there's Naomi Klein's

No Logo

…

You're right, Dan, this is exactly how racism works. And sexism, heterosexism, classicism, ableism and all the rest. Until those types of oppression are completely eradicated, they'll be with us to some extent, but the first step towards making the solution is identifying the problem.

I also agree that you can't learn Japanese culture by watching anime, but that's not the same as saying you can't learn it at all. You can't learn everything about Japanese culture, or even just a subsection thereof—but then, this applies even if

you yourself are Japanese

. Nobody can know everything about a culture, their own or anyone else's.

Fortunately, authors don't need to do that much, any more than honest anthropologists do. How should an author in the United States go about writing a story set in modern India with modern Indian characters? To which I would reply: the same way said author should go about writing a story set in medieval Europe (or a decent knock-off thereof): research. Of course, cultural imperialism and cultural misappropriation are dangers that rear their ugly heads in the former case, but I think if the author comes at it with the right mindset (including but not limited to sympathy, sensitivity, awareness of probable pitfalls and a continentload of caution) they can pull it off (though you can't please

every

one).

I have the same problem with Whedon's Misogynist-Of-The-Week depiction of sexism as you do. Audiences in my experience tend to process characterization first, symbolism second. (A strongly feminist friend of mine who is also a major Whedon fan once tried to sell me some argument about how incredibly feminist the symbolism of the female characters in

Firefly

is. I'm betting she'd say the same about

Dollhouse

. My reply would be that even if so, the straightforward characterization is rather less feminist, to put it charitably, and that counts for a lot more.)

I'm sure

Harry Potter

could've sold if Harry had been black, or brown, or any other known shade of human skin. Whether it would've been such a cult phenomenon is a different problem. (Who knows, it might've been. And yes, that would've done more than probably any ten government initiatives. And what if he'd been Arabic …?)

people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

That's a very good point, Guy. I believe I maybe try harder than Roddenberry to be progressive on issues of race, sex, sexuality, class and all the other -isms, but if in 100 years' time people aren't looking at my fiction and finding a dozen holes in it at first glance, I'll be one disappointed ancestor. I'll be disappointed because it will mean that a) the culture will not have progressed so far as to outpace anything I could even imagine at my most radical, or b) that I never ended up actually publishing any fiction (or at least none worth looking at). To some extent, whatever I do will be a product of its time, just like the

Star Trek

.

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

Yeah well, white privilege means that you can ignore all that and not have to worry too much. Whereas if you're a person of colour (say, Arabic) and you piss off the white folks, Allah help you. (There are exceptions like Salman Rushdie, of course, but they are very much the exception.)

I for one do care about public opinion of people of colour, but I think it better to take that risk and at least try to be part of the solution than play it safe and know for sure that I'm perpetuating the problem.

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards;

This is a good point, Arthur. I recently read Michael Crichton's

State of Fear

, and, for various reasons, have been obsessing over it for months. It's a pretty mediocre thriller, but I have an intense love/hate relationship with the discourse. Some of it I agree with, a lot of it I don't, but what really gets me is that Crichton sets himself up to make his points in a way that should get even the readers who don't agree with him thinking, then lets most of it dissolve into a tired political rant. I felt like I would've enjoyed the book more—should've enjoyed it more—even as I was disagreeing with it, but Crichton failed to try hard enough to connect with the skeptics (which is ironic considering we're presumably the one's he's addressing).

… Although, as Dan points out, there's a difference between something being disagreeable and something actually insulting you as a person because of the social group you happen to belong to, especially when there is a looong history of insult and oppression of people from that social group.

On the other hand, as we're agreed that in a racist society everyone is racist to some degree, all the fiction we produce is probably going to be racist in some way. So if we can't find any merit in racist works, then Arthur's suggestion of throwing out everything before 1950 is too conservative by half.

So basically, I guess, it all comes down to degree of offensiveness and personal taste. If you can find merit in something, I'd say there's probably some merit, although I reserve the right to withdraw my condone-ance (there doesn't seem to be a proper word for that) if the merit you find is something along the lines of e.g. “All Arabs are evil.”

As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

Damn, you people are good at making excellent points with incredible clarity.

It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".

That's my viewpoint too, and something I feel slightly guilty about not cultivating more some of the time. However, I do think there's a bigger difference than you suggest, Arthur. I have a lot of close friends who are queer, but when I see something homophobic, the fact that “they're talking about my friends” doesn't spring immediately to mind. Similarly, when I see something blatantly anti-Palestinian, I don't immediately think of my Palestinian-American friend.

I agree that it helps to have friends who belong to the insulted group in question, but maybe not as much as you suggest.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Or in the liner notes to the movie script. Dumbeldore's sexual orientation on the other hand …

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do;

Well I for one, don't doubt the exact opposite, and think that's a

very

dangerous philosophical road to venture onto. Of course, it partially depends on what definition of “Evil” we're working under, but still …

re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

Me neither.

And yes, racism is amazingly adaptive when it comes to rhetoric.

I've heard elsewhere that positive exposure tends to dilute one's own prejudices at least. So yes, diverse elementary schools = very good idea.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance.

Like all other types of basically immoral attitudes/behaviors/actions. War/torture/murder/rape, people can (and too often do) excuse away the patently inexcusable when it gets down to specifics. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get people to stop doing this I'm listening.

very

attentively.

[batboyblog]

DC has lost its way (again)

Someone commented on the real lack of diversity in DC comics theese days. They were right there are no canon gay couples, no gay male characters, a real lack of nonwhite characters too. However DC is even less diverse than that. What I mean is since the new 52 there are no old heroes, no body dealing with getting elderly and outliving friends etc. As far as I know (I admit to not reading every DC book) Superman was the only married hero and one of just two fathers. But DC sent Lois Lane and Jon Kent away in the Superman book. Batman not only didn’t get married he barely interacts with his children. Tim left, he’s fighting Jason, Dick got shot and will forget, Damian and him don’t seem to talk when was the last time we saw Duke? And Cass isn’t his kid anymore. Indeed Bruce And Alfred seem to interact less than before. Teen comics are doing better but no solo book is held down by a young adult hero. Super Sons comes closest but no Robin solo or Kid Flash etc.

Just saying you can’t make a good universe of good stories if all your characters are 25 to 40 year old single straight white men with disposable income.